When I was about three I was outside on a porch banging on a screen door wanting to go back in the house while my mother and aunt were busy preparing food in the kitchen. I grew frustrated as they ignored me. Finally I cursed at her, something like, “Let me in you son of a bitch of a mommy”. That got immediate results. I found myself unceremoniously dragged inside to the kitchen sink and my mouth washed out with disgusting tasting soap and not gently at all while being admonished to never talk to her like that again. I never did. They didn’t mess around in those days.
Category: Random Thoughts
Gun control and abortion
Joe Biden’s gun control argument seems to be, citing the standard example of shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, that no natural right is absolute. Doesn’t it follow then, given abortion is a natural right, that the right to have an abortion is not absolute? It too has limits?
Reflections as the sun falls.
Reflecting. On a hilltop. All I can say is, growing up under my father I know what it’s like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. Of course i exaggerate, but you get the idea. His word was law. He was very strict.
Inflation
Inflation, inflation, inflation. Governments caused this by shutting everything down and idling the work force. It won’t be cured by giving people money. That’ll only make the fiat currrncy lose more value. It will be cured by everybody pitching in and getting back to work and filling the supply chains and warehouses with goods again. It proves once again that governments can’t manage economies.
Rainy April Night
Crazy rain, thunder, the dog is terrified and I say to her, “Don’t worry, God willing we’ll make it through this night…”. Then I think of those in the world right now who have no guarantee at all that they will live through the night at the hands of other people mostly. There is no reason why in 2022 anyone on earth should have to worry about their life at the hands of other people. What are we doing wrong? Are we failing as a species?
And yet, how naive the hope for peace. The earth is a beautiful garden filled with thistles and thorns , hidden fangs and vicious teeth and I ate bacon this morning. How can we expect that humans will ever stop killing one another when we’ve been honed in such a place?
Still, there is more to being Human than being just another highly evolved animal, an organic machine shaped by the flow of trial and error of interacting chains of events and chemical reactions that stream through time, some failing, some succeeding, all constantly changing as the world slides ceaselessly down the energy hill. We can conceive of morals and ethics and what we could and should be even if a God is not there and the world is given to us as brute, uncaring, unforgiving reality. That is remarkable and unexpected. These deeper questions are part of human experience too and if we pay heed to them we begin to understand that it is up to us to find a path of balance between the cruel necessities and realities of this world and higher morality, ethics and goodness, the beautiful and inspiring and uplifting possibilities in existence. That is our unique responsibility as Humans. Our cognizance renders spirituality onto us.
Futuristic dreams
I’m waiting for the hydrogen-boron battery, a battery that operates by producing electricity through the hydrogen-boron fusion reaction and that will last a hundred years or until its casing rusts away and it falls apart. You’d never have to charge your phone or your electric car. It’d just run until the wheels fell off. The pressure on landfills would be greatly lessened and the earth’s atmosphere would breathe a great sigh of relief. If only the laws of nature would cooperate *he wistfully reflects*
Garden of Eden
Thorns and thistles outside. Compared to the neighborhood the earth really is the Garden of Eden.
Saturday morning observation
I watch my 3D printer working busily away this late winter morning and marvel at what it is doing. It would have been a flabbergasting miracle in 1960 and still is despite the dulling of that by future shock. I can design and manufacture a part in my workshop on a wintery Saturday morning while I sip my coffee and marvel at the miracles of life in 2022.
Written in Stone
Our lives are written in stone when we pass. We will never do another thing in this material world and nothing further can be changed. Then as winters come and go and years pass the symbols begin to fade. They weather away and dissipate until at long last nothing but the ghost of our memory remains and the world rushes on in the distant future unaware we ever were.
2022
Our problem as a species is, science. We learned too much. We were better off in the days of dragons, fairies, gods and unexplored lands. Now we have bombs, pollution, overpopulation, and that Venus is hot as an oven. Our knowledge has exceeded our emotions.