Rich, Radical Philanthropists to Manage National Savings Fund

I just heard a story on NPR about a giant investment fund for Great Britain involving a law to have employers opt in for their employees.  And there's talk about doing it in the US.

But who would manage such a huge, tempting fund where it could be exploited or frauded for personal gain?  How about someone (or their foundation) who has so much money they're going to give it all away, who would have no interest in amassing any more personal wealth, and who has a foundation already established to save the world?  They might even do it for free if they believed in it.

Honest Abortion

Enough rhetoric.  Enough politics.  Enough polemics, hyperbole and melodramatics.

Abortion is a hard decision, it's traumatic, and it should be prevented, avoided, and obviated at every opportunity.  No one wants an abortion, even someone who wants an abortion.  They want an abortion ONLY because fear  a greater pain for the future baby than the pain of killing their unborn baby, their own death, or some social stigma (caused by the expectation of being judged by their imagined society for unwed motherhood or other, or fear of the death of their livelihood).

You bitches and sons of bitches who try to shame people into not getting abortions should figure it out. Pray for a cessation of your displaced anger and aggression and for the ability to stop your egregious judgment. If you really want to stem the tide of abortions, get off your arrogant high horse and apply all of your energies in that area to 1. Educating people about the options, 2. Making people who might want to abort understand that you will adopt their baby (or find a good family who will), and find every other option for the future born baby that will make carrying the baby to term a REAL option for the reluctant mother!  If that means supplying the means to support her through her pregnancy, fighting for additional employment rights for pregnant women. Don't bury your big head in the sand and pretend your anti-birth control stance is not a ridiculous contradiction to anti-abortion.  Anti-birth control and anti-abortion requires a suspension of your natural intelligence tantamount to intentional ignorance which flipping off your Creator, "Um, thanks for the brains, but I'm not interested in using them."  If you want people to be abstinent, than you have to somehow be involved enough in the lives of your target (through building trust through love and caring) that they can hear you and want to follow your counsel!  Are you willing to take up that cross or are you just a blow-hard trying to impose your righteousness on others.  Own your bullshit and live with integrity.

On Muslim Presidents

Anyone who believes their religious faith beliefs should be part of their governmental professional agenda should be summarily removed from office.  Christian, Muslim, Jew -- as an elected official at any level of US government, your job is to advance a Constitionally sound platform that serves every person of every religion or no religion.  So if we allow Christians to hold office presuming they can separate their religious faith from their official responsibility (which we do), we necessarily will allow people of any other religion to hold office.

If you believe your religion in such a way as to promote an exclusionary agenda against non-believers, then no.  Get your ass out of the public policy game.

Most religions, the big 3 for sure, have somewhere in their orthodoxy, a strong anti-out-group bias.  They've all persecuted and been persecuted.  But if you hold to that dogma tucked away in your creed which actually contradict the real center of your religion (love your neighbor), then you should seek other employment than public service. If your interpretation of your religion does not consider all people equal in dignity and respect under the law, you need another profession.  How many ways can I say it.

If adhering to a religious principal that demands you in any way to diminish others because of their religious beliefs (or lack thereof) is important to you, stay away from government!

Kennedy went so far as to make a public statement that he, as President, would be beholden only to the nation as his guiding star:

     "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.     I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all."

The case for Muslims: Because there is a significant number of Muslims around the world who cling to violent and exclusionary principals, and including in our own country, people naturally, if unfairly, associate all Muslims with this practice and belief system.  The gut reaction is to fear (and hence, discriminate, denigrate, hate, fear, mock, or otherwise react against) all of them.  It's an embarrassing and unAmerican stance.  Those of higher character will not succumb to that intellectually and morally weak reaction, but maintain that it is not Islam or its practitioners per se that need to be feared, but those who choose to (or just do) interpret their religion in such a way that promotes violence against those who believe different.

Stay strong, people.  Stay smart.  When you start making decisions and policy based on fear, you tread dangerously close to being that which you hate.

Chase that kid out of his den of technologiniquity

We'll pretend to remember when everyone used to play outside all day, riding bikes, baseball, kick the can, catching fireflies, climbing trees, sneaking in the neighbor's yard for crab apples, riding motorcycles, racing canoes and hunting.  And forget all the kids who stayed inside all day watching tv, reading, doing little nothings, because the people posting all those memories online were the ones doing it and the people not posting it (among others) didn't.  There have always been the sloths, and now with the allure of the new brain-stroking activities, indoors and online, a larger percentage of today's kids are doing it.  So it's not a matter of quality so much as quantity.

How do we get young people to get their asses out there and do things that are challenging, active, enriching and fun?  Simple.  We take them in some cases.  We let them in other cases.  We set the example and we live it ourselves, and we drag them along, and fuck their protests, because they will more than thank us when they grow up.  They'll perpetuate it, they'll appreciate it deeply, they'll perform better and live a better life.  Let them bitch and moan while they're hiking up a boring old mountain.  Let them pine for their iPhones while they try again to get up on one ski.  Let them wish they had a wireless connection and device while they sit around the campfire and recall the first time they caught a fish and catch a glimpse of a shooting star and the Northern Lights.  Race them across the field, throw the football with them and shoot some hoops, take them to the firing range and show them how to get the fire roaring with a single match (or a couple sparks).  Quit your idiotic lamentations and start an adventure club where you actually share some opportunities with the local youth, partnering with a community foster-care support non-profit and be part of the solution instead of a squawking tree, rooted to your easy chair, like I am now.

Where Wealth Redistribution Lies

You hear the negative tone from the Right repudiating wealth distribution as a socialist corruption of democracy and capitalism.

Here's the question: Are they stupid, blind, or obfuscating?

Let's go with reality instead of philosophy for a second.  The real story of wealth redistribution is the shift of wealth from the lower and middle class to the wealthy over the last 50 years.  When the rich control politics which influences government (which makes the rules about taxes and their distribution, fiscal policy, minimum wage, labor law, etc.), it's just what I'd expect.  They end up getting richer and more powerful on the backs, and from the pockets. of the rest of us.  Wage inequality and the wealth redistribution in this country is out of control (to use technical systems analysis jargon).  If it keeps up, it's a positive feedback loop that will continue to weaken America (against a hypothetical potential of what it could be) until the top-heavy wealth distribution leads to increasing desperation and it tumbles.  Trickle down just didn't really work, did it.

The smartest long-term action for the currently wealthy is to change course and increase the wages of the poor and lower middle class to help more of them reach financial stability because their collective confidence in their situation creates economic stability instead of slaves that will eventually check out (happening more and more when you look at the unemployed, no longer looking for work, which turns them into bigger burdens).

What are the odds, though, of the wealthy (who hold corporate purse strings) voluntarily shrinking the wage gap between the higher and lower wages within their control?  Keep margins the same, but switch the salary scale way to the left of what it is now.  Costco versus Walmart.  Starbucks versus McDonalds.

An Old Man's Review of "The Martian"

The Martian does two things exceptionally well: science and suspense.  Because of the latter, it was hard to put down, and because of the former, I wasn't put off.  For a lot of people out there, those two things are enough, and like "Gravity" and "128 Hours," it would make a very watchable 2 hour movie.  Given its timeliness, with the Mars mission somewhere lurking in the public discussion and imagination (waiting to explode, someday, I hope), it could be a great box office success, and even, significantly, a catalyst for bringing the real plausibility of a manned mission to Mars higher in the zeitgeist.

If you're a person who grew up on the near-entirety of Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, Clark, Tolkien, and King, there's one of two things you've grown to expect from a really epic work: story.  And characters.  Well, this one's got some good stuff, but not those.  He's most like Clark in his strict adherence to hard science.

Another plus was Weir's use of believable potential challenges deriving from the setting itself and natural course of events to drive the action without invoking unlikely externals.  Nicely done, Andy!

But as literature, it left me wanting.  In "128 Hours," (I didn't read the book), the flash-forward in his vision to his child was a powerful and memorable part of the movie for me, and perhaps when they make the movie, they'll find a way to humanize Watney (the main character) way better than Weir did in the book.

The kicker: I'm pretty sure if I tried my hand at writing a sci-fi novel, it'd end up more like this book than one of the masters', who are able to work their magical wordsmithing to get me inside their characters and their worlds, and because they had more to work with (outside abject reality, which Weir stays well inside), they were able to make me co-create the other-worldliness into something realer.  Mars is enough like a desert, enough like the moon, enough like something I know that it brings the real world in with it when invoked.

Another cool thing about The Martian is that it can be buzzed through in a day for someone who knows science or just trusts Weir's math (which I did, no reason to re-calculate anything) and the science, which is also something I'm familiar enough with to follow along fine.  It's a nice lightning-fast read that lets you read it as a break from whatever else you may be in the middle of, so that's cool.  But it's not one of those books that breaks my heart from being over because I want to spend more time in its world, which I use as my own personal hallmark of a masterpiece of literature (for ME, not for the world).  I think that's more of the bottom line -- literature is what it is to an individual (or even a small following) and the collective is much less meaningful.

It's Messy. Get To IT!

The history of life on Earth is messy, wasteful, bloody, painful, and constantly changing.  But it's mesmerizing, awesome, sublime, elegant, beautiful and unlikely.  Yes, it is all of those things, and human society is all of those things.

Today's world evolved through tooth and nail, extinction and explosions, famine and flood, drought and deluge.  Each still living organism sufficiently adapted to have survived until today, and there's no guarantee for any of us for the next millennium.  Any of us (fish, birds, mammals, reptiles, insects, etc.) could be gone in the geological blink of an eye, and any of us (individually) could be snuffed out tomorrow.  But one thing is common -- all the surviving species so far had to, at some point in their lives, fight to the death for our place in the ecosystem.

Society is like that.  Different ways of living, models for community, and modes of thought have ebbed and flowed, risen and fallen, been invented and become extinct, using the same fundamental dynamic as life: the most adaptable for a given environment is the one that survives.  It's in this invention and adaption/adoption and the competition for dominance where the interesting things happen, and it's happening right now in every aspect of modern human life.  The species is healthy when people are striving for something, for their survival, and whoever strives hardest, is willing to join the fray for the sustainability for their ideas, to help them propagate and thrive, will dominate.

My question to you is which ideas are you out fighting for?  How hard are you fighting?  If enough of us are willing to sit by and let the elite, the desperate, the enlightened, or the others do the fighting, if we don't choose an ideal we'd like to see flourish and get behind it, those ideas will wither and die.  We are most alive when we are in the arena, we are most at peace when we are struggling for what we know to be a worthy cause.  Are you in?  Or are you on the sidelines watching.  Pick up your tools and get building.  Get on the bullhorn and lead.  Grab your bat and step up to the base.  Take up your cross and follow.  Whatever your favorite metaphor, the more people representing what they deeply believe, the better we'll be.  As real members of the chain of life still inhabiting the planet, the fighters will own the future and either make it better, and the idle will hasten our demise.

Use your limited tenure to advance your cause, and if you don't have one, open your eyes and ears and let the one that makes your blood boil, that raises your hackles, that makes you cry, or that brings you to your feet with a shout, drive you.  Get into it, learn more, and get to work.  Get off the damn couch, get your butt out into the real world, with your community action teams, your legislative working groups, your staff of volunteers building something, your horde of volunteers cleaning up the estuary, your neighborhood watch watching for crime, your church group gathering blankets for the homeless, your art co-op creating posters to spread the word about injustice, your design team to create the new school, your youth-group teaching teens about savings accounts and budgeting.  You name it, there's something you can give to be part of a solution.  Yes, your main occupation is often a great goodness, and unless your job is directly improving policy and process, there is something you are particularly suited for.

There will be casualties on both sides, but letting evil (however you see it) win is a bigger casualty for all.  No cutting yourself slack because life's hard.  No cutting yourself slack because life is easy.  Join your cause and advance it with gusto.  And if you find out you're fighting the wrong battle half way through because you learned more, broadened your perspective, saw the light, then cut your losses, undo your damage and get on the right side.  It's through the fight that you know -- like the soldier who now fights for peace, the former racist to now teaches acceptance, the gangster who helps children avoid his mistakes.  Fight to make your community, or state, or country, or mankind better because of you and for your children and mine.  If you don't fight, you may not suffer, but your progeny will.  Face the fear, take the risk, and when you do die, you'll be in heaven (which I define as dying with a smile in your heart (if not on your face) for having done your best to better your world and pay back the universe for blessing you with the sublime gift of life.

You can do all that while giving your family all the love they need when they need it -- it's not an exclusive proposition.  In fact, if you are not living to your potential, you're not doing a very good job of modeling and teaching your children what it means to truly live.  That's your job as a parent. Get to it!