Light from many lamps – Quotes on mature actions

Tags

Mature behavior, Maturity quotations, Properly motivated actions, Stoicism

Light from Many Lamps: A Treasury of Inspiration by Lillian Watson. In this book there are many quotations about mature actions. Here are some selections that seemed to lead toward successful actions. [A few have my personal comments inserted in brackets.] Part one.

5
How important is health to happiness, yet the best promoter of health is something [important] to do.  John Burroughs [Happiness is in making progress on an important task that you of all of the people who have ever lived are here at this time and place able to do.]

6
The [personal] reward of a thing well done is [for you] to have done it. Ralph Waldo Emerson

7
The mintage of wisdom is to know that rest is rust, and that real life is love, laughter, and work. Elbert Hubbard [The action terms would be – kindness, humor and accomplishment. It is wisdom to know that idleness brings boredom and despair; a happy life is fulled with kindness, humor and accomplishment.]

[What wonderful things am I going to do today?]

9
A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it be—without wishing for what he has not. Seneca

10
He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has. Epictetus

12
But happiness is not in having or being: it is in doing. Lillian Eichler Watson

13
Choose a movement that presents a distinct trend toward greater human happiness and align yourself with it. W. Beran Wolfe

14
Unless we think of others and so something for them, we miss one of the greatest sources of happiness. Ray Lyman Wilbur  [Unless we observe others, and do something to help them toward their goal, we miss the greatest source of happiness.]

17
To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy . . . to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly . . . William S. Ogdon

21
The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts. William Lyon Phelps

25
It is humiliating to find how quickly and completely one’s place is filled, but it is a very good lesson. Frederic Loomis [You are the only one who can do this job right now, and no one can do it better, right now. This is true of everyone.]

29
Today should always be our most wonderful day. Thomas Dreier

37
Abide with me; fast falls the eventide … song by Henry Francis Lyte [The Universe is infinitely wonderful! It permits all things that can be done; It prevents all things that can not be done.]

43
Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which flows into you as life, place yourself in the full center of that flood, then you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment. Ralph Waldo Emerson [Place yourself with people of wisdom doing wonderful things.]

60
Good-night! good-night! as we so oft have said,
Beneath this roof at midnight, in the days
That are no more, and shall no more return.
Thou hast but taken up thy lamp and gone to bed;
I stay a little longer, as one stays
To cover up the embers that still burn.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

67
Properly understood, prayer is a mature activity indispensable to the fullest development of personality-the ultimate integration of man’s highest faculties. Alexis Carrel

74
This, too, shall pass away. [Now is the only time you can do what you want to do.]

77
Think often of how swiftly all things pass away and are no more-the works of Nature and the works of man. Marcus Aurelius

83
Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens. Epictetus

91
It is not what you have lost, but what you have left that counts. Harold Russell [Make use of what you have to accomplish your task.]

93
Sickness is a hindrance to the body, but not to the will, unless the will consent. Lameness is a hindrance to the leg, but not to the will.  Say this to yourself at each event that happens, for you shall find that though it hinders something else it will not hinder “you.” Epictetus 

93
For your business is to act the character that is given to you and act it well. The choice of the cast is Another’s. Epictetus [This is a practice of improvisation training.]

93
Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune. William James

93
I thank God for my handicaps, for, through them, I have found my self, my work, and my God. Helen Keller

96
Nothing happens to a man which he is not formed by nature to bear. Marcus Aurelius [The time will come when nature will return us to random matter, and we have no choice but to bear it.]

113
Spend your brief moment according to nature’s law, and serenely greet the journey’s end as an olive falls when it is ripe, blessing the branch that bare it, and giving thanks to the tree that gave it life. Marcus Aurelius

115
How well he fell asleep!
Like some proud river, widening toward the sea;
Calmly and grandly, silently and deep,
Life joined eternity. Samuel T. Coleridge

Seeing through data, information, and facts to right actions.

Tags

Camouflage, Making right decisions, Mimicry, Using collected data

After we see though all the camouflage, the mimicry, and all of the other intentional and unintentional confusion, and discover what can be known to a level of multiscoped reality, there remains the problem of what to do. What is the right action to take given the reality we must cope with?

What are the parameters of right action? Everything can’t be decided by observed facts, and numbers, and lines on a graph, but reality can be known and those tools can be aids to knowing reality more clearly. We must find the right data, but then we must see this data in a way that makes sense to the situation and is justifiable later when the total situation has returned to a stable condition. The problem becomes how to use the known data, and factor in the unknown data, for making the best decisions.

Camouflage theory can help with decisions of appropriate behavior, because it is a very similar problem to the camouflage of information. The challenge is to see past the confusion, noise and natural problems to the intentional camouflage, and distractions provided by competition with whom you are in conflict with at some level. It is important to be able to identify the intentional camouflage and separate it from the natural background noise. Camouflage implies intent to deceive, and thus, since it costs time, effort and money to create the camouflage, it is a good indicator of something of sufficient value to be hidden, or to pretend that there is something of value there to be hidden. Appropriate action is potentially covered by another layer of obfuscation, it is a second layer of potential camouflage by the competition.

In some ways seeing the decision is just a continuation of the same problem of how to gain one’s will against another competing force. The first layer was to prevent the seeing of true factual information of external realities, with camouflage and focusing of attention elsewhere with distractions. Then even if you succeed in getting accurate information about the reality there is the possibility of being misled as to the actions to be taken relative to the problems. Thus, there becomes the possibility of applying camouflage to secondary items, and the opposite of camouflage, the revealing of attractive things upon which one might act, but of course these are biased attractions based on whoever is doing the camouflage and leading the game.

This deception could go on with infinitely deep layers upon layers, but that is unlikely, because it is an expensive pursuit, and at some point the person providing the camouflage is himself confused. The point of camouflage is to be effective, and if the simplistic and cheapest is effective that is what should be used.

Some experimental actions for Unitarian-Universalist Sunday meetings.

Tags

Ceremonies, Recognition of worth, Unitarian Universalists

I moved to Bend, Oregon, a year ago and have been attending the local Unitarian-Universalist church. I have been nominally a Unitarian since high school but my contact with that official organization began with the college-age arm of that church called Channing Club at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. Later, after departing the US Air Force, I started attending the Berkeley, California Channing Club in 1960. The group there was made up of graduate students, but we were a cohesive group and over the years we were holding our meetings totally separate from the official church. It is still meeting now, fifty-two years later. Mostly it was a discussion group, but those were wonderful years and talks.

Here in Bend, my relationship with this UU group has been quite different because the structure of the assembled group of people is totally different and much more diverse. The Sunday meetings would be easily confused with any traditional Christian church. There are thoughtful sermons on uplifting subjects, there is singing of old churchy-sounding songs with a moral point, there is a basket passed around for collecting small sums of money for good causes, and there is a mingling of the people after the events with coffee and snacks. All of this is standard church meeting stuff. However, in this particular congregation there are some other events which are not so similar.

On the third Sunday, a portion of the whole congregation, usually about thirty people, gather in a circle and participate in an organized group discussion of some important topic – usually a moral topic. That is similar to the original Channing Club.

Another unusual thing that happens at the beginning of every traditional service is a ceremony of sending the kids off to Sunday school. It consists of forming an arch of hands across the main aisle and as the kids march out under the arch we sing a simple little send-off song. I really enjoy that minute because it has so much of a warm unifying feeling between the kids and the adults.

After the kids are gone there is a sharing of “joys and sorrows” by the members of the congregation who choose to briefly mention, in a few sentences, something significant that has happened to them or someone dear to them. It sometimes seems tedious, but it is amazing hearing just how much has happened in a single week to this group of people and I grow fond of hearing those soliloquies.

Then there is a brief minute-sermon about some inner thoughts that we might consider followed by a binging of a small bell and we all remain silent in contemplation for a minute until the bell sounds again. It is a programmed minute of  the week where we have a chance to consider deeper things without distraction.

Unitarian-Universalist gifting of a flower to another person.

Those things and a few similar ones are done every Sunday, but then there are some other events which happen only occasionally. For example, this week every person who remembered brought a flower to the meeting and placed it in a vase on the large altar at the front stage. The flowers were on display while the other meeting things took place. They were quite lovely. Some were things that I have never seen before. At the end of the service we all went up and took a new flower for ourselves. It was a symbolic way for our congregation to share gifts with one another.

There was an event which happened a few months ago, based on the Mexican Indian tradition of Día de los Muertos. In this event each individual brought a small remembrance item of something or someone lost and placed it on the altar. This little ceremony was so very powerful because everyone, old and young, has had some grievous loss and participating even remotely in these ceremonies with a new-found friend’s loss is heart rending and unifying with those people.

These various experiences got me to thinking about what other ceremonies might be created and which might also serve to bind this group of people into an even more deeply shared human experience? We all owe so very much of our existence to things totally outside of our control that were given to us and of which we are aware but rarely have opportunity to acknowledge, even with a simple symbolic gesture. One event which comes to mind happened last summer where the service was conducted by one of our lay persons who was very familiar with American Indian traditions. She conducted a ceremony which blessed the four directions and gave abstract spiritual qualities befitting to each of them. The East for creation of sunshine and life, South for maintenance and growth, West for maturity and completions and North for abstract things. We are indebted to Nature but this was an opportunity to participate in acknowledging that debt.

I want to think about those things and create some new ceremonies for reflecting on old things which are not given enough recognition.

The 10th most important issue facing humanity is abstraction.

Tags

Excessive abstraction, Explaining reality, Responsible behavior, Story telling, Truth telling

People don’t care for abstract thinking, but they love a story. Some even like astoundingly poor stories. I love Plan Nine From Outer Space, which is claimed by many movie buffs to be the worst movie ever made. Maybe so — I might even agree with them — but it has a living human intelligence behind the poorly delivered dead zombie dialog, and it does address our existential problem and humanity’s place in the universe. I know of no other that faces so squarely our responsibility to the Universe and the distant living intelligences that inhabit it.

The problem with good stories is that they very often, perhaps always, violate objective reality and teach us to love and learn behaviors that are counterproductive to our own welfare and hurtful to everyone else. What is needed is a blend of good storytelling skills and a solid grounding in reality to provide workable solutions for our edification.

Perhaps the actors Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger are good examples, because they were both masters of fantasy and of storytelling. Later in their careers they found their way into higher politics where they were able to exploit their acting and storytelling skills in real world politics.

Abstraction of reality is necessary to form any conception of the world which surrounds us, but it tends to be analytical and cold to human emotions and the daily flow of typical human thought. Abstraction may offer us fine patterns for our mind to perceive the relationships among things of the natural world, but it doesn’t offer the feeling that is the motivating force behind our actions.

This blog has been rife with that type of dry analytical thinking. Although it may have clarified many things, it has left these writings unnecessarily alienated from the rest of humanity. My plan is to change the style of these posts somewhat and explore the more human and emotional ways of presenting ideas. The EarthArk Project is about as abstract a subject as one is likely to encounter, but it is essential that some such plan be put into place for the future of humanity and the earth to be as healthy as possible. It needs to have a more human presentation for it to be accepted and become successfully implemented.

Tomorrow I shall begin telling stories.

The 8th most important issue facing humanity is human stupidity.

Tags

Human stupidity, Nuclear reactors, Poor design of reactors

The appallingly poor design of the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan defines human stupidity at its most sublime. Potentially even more destructive than thermonuclear bombs are nuclear reactors. A bomb gives off much of its power in the explosion and most of the radioactive byproducts are dissipated in a month, but a melt-down reactor would spew vastly more radioactive material and continue doing so over many years. These reactors must be made not just safe but absolutely safe, even from a direct hit by an atomic bomb dropped by a hostile power.

The nuclear disaster Fukushima Japan caused by tsunami.

Photo from Gizmondo. From this photograph you can see the reactor buildings with their roofs blown off by explosions. Most of the buildings are still intact, but just imagine what a single attack by a single B-52 bomber with 100 conventional bombs would do to this site. If just four of those conventional bombs were armor piercing and guided directly into the core of these four reactors, what would happen?Needless to say if the plant cannot recover from the relatively modest natural assault by the sea it would go into total chaos after such an easily conducted military attack.

A nuclear power plant would be a very high priority for a military attack, and the Israelis have already demonstrated this by attacking reactors in Syria and Iraq. They are now contemplating an attack against ones in Iran. Because they are such desirable targets the reactors should be designed and built in such a way that they can sustain total damage and still not go into a melt down. Because, if a melt down occurs it will impact the rest of the world for the future. Absolutely everyone, forevermore will be negatively impacted.

A 3D mock-up image from Google Earth showing the Fukushima reactor.

A yellow line 100 meters long has been drawn along the shore for scale. The closest building is less than 50 meters from the normally crashing sea. Obviously the tsunami went much further inland.

---

A list of problems and solutions for the Fukushima reactors

1. Located on zone of frequent major earthquakes. – Relocate the reactors to Japan’s safer regions to the west.
2. Located on a sea shore with frequent major tsunamis. – Design a seawall for the biggest possible wave then make it bigger.
3. Position of the reactors was too close together so if one fails the others are at risk of failure. – Have an international law, that all reactors and storage facilities are built at least a kilometer apart, because meltdowns affect everyone
4. Storing spent fuel rods in a liquid storage pond over the reactor, so if something goes seriously wrong with the reactor or the pond both become dangerous. – Have a piping system to transport small containers of dangerous materials to and from remote storage sites.
5. Placing the whole thing inside an unventilated building so a possible build up of hydrogen from known reactions is concentrated and becomes explosive. – Maintain an easily open-able and close-able containment building.
6. Not making the whole power plant absolutely safe from even a major military attack. – Totally enclose the reactors deep within the Earth with automatically safe shut down built in.
7. Placing the workers work-stations so they can not do their jobs when there is a problem. – Have workers at a safe distance and in radiation and explosion proof work sites, with safe tunnels to the reactors, with clean filtered air forced to their stations.
8. Very limited access to the reactors when there is a problem. – Design the whole system so there is a safe and easy access to all critical places during worst case situations.
9. Not having many independent automatic fail-safe back up systems. – Make any system failures send the system automatically into an inert condition.
10. Having stupid people designing, building and operating these very dangerous devices. – Since all people are presumed to be stupid, have designers, builders and operators, and similarly knowledgeable people periodically come in the situation and offer challenges to the system.

---

Go to BBC, The battle to keep control of nuclear plant in Japan, to see the article which were the source for the photos below.

Fukushima, Japan nuclear power plant disaster. The buildings are beside the sea.

The spent fuel rods are stored in heavy-water ponds at the top of the reactors.

The spent fuel rods are reported to be stored in the heavy water pool at the top of the reactors. This is an independent risk from the reactor core itself, and a failure of either one seriously effects the safe control of the other one.

A diagram showing the nuclear disaster problems at the Fukushima reactors

Diagram from Yahoo News

There is no cure for human stupidity and shortsightedness therefore, since –

People are stupid. They must be frequently challenged to obey natural laws.

The 6th most important issue facing humanity is poisoned habits.

Tags

famine, Human hubris, human nature, Malthus, Mother Nature

Human behavior is controlled by habits. These are short routines with which we automatically direct our inner thoughts and outer actions. We learn these habits as part of growing up; they are very resistant to change and generally are best controlled by controlling the environments we place ourselves within. This of course is a habit also, but there are occasional moments of consciousness of what we are doing when we can voluntarily change our future behavior. However, these moments are rare and are usually associated with a complete change of circumstance, and pain if we continue what we were previously doing.

Whole societies, and humanity itself, are a vast collection of habitual responses to perceived inputs. Generally, this all works out for the maintenance of people and their institutions, but in the modern world we approaching some inescapable limits to which we will be forced to respond. For example, we have clearly exceeded the permanent carrying capacity of the Earth, by consuming quantities of one-time-use materials for which there is no substitute. It took natural processes millions of years to create the coal, oil and gas that we have consumed half of in the last one hundred years. Our food supply is largely dependent upon these mineral energy sources for their creation, and when they are gone most of the food supply they provide will also be gone. When the food supply drops to ten percent of the present supply the population will also drop to ten percent of its present size. If we cultivate the land as done back in 1600, our population would drop from seven billion to one billion. Fortunately we have better equipment and more productive crops but, unfortunately, the land itself has been mined of nutrients, so its natural productivity would be much less. Also, much soil has been washed away into the sea by erosion, so there is less land to cultivate than there used to be. People will not know what the food carrying capacity of the Earth actually is until all these factors are in play, but in about two hundred years these will be known and adaptations will have been made. That seems like a very long time, certainly much longer than we will live, but it is a very short time when measured by historical standards.

The time of population collapse will occur before that date, because when food starts running out there will be social turmoil such as we have never witnessed, and so we have no conception how our social institutions will hold up. But it seems unlikely that population reduction will be an orderly process controlled by human laws. I am not recommending population restrictions at the present time, because it is obvious that we have already overshot Earth’s carrying capacity and with a life expectancy of seventy plus years people already alive will witness the end of abundance and the days not just of scarcity but years of near absence of necessities. Even if there was not a single new child born for ten years this collapse will be upon us because the people already alive will eat up all of the consumables. It is a grim picture, and I hope I am wrong, but with the population already existing able to consume what remains, the hope of an orderly solution seems forlorn, and with the population still doubling in forty years and refusing to even consider it as a problem, let alone confront the issue, there seems little reason to expect anything but nature to intervene and solve the problem of human success and excess.

The basic problem is that individuals have been seeing humanity’s problems as a ramped-up example of personal problems. They have poisoned their habits of thinking into a mind set where there will be solutions found to these problems, because their experience has shown that, in a well ordered society, problems always have a fix. Up until 1800, when Malthus was developing his famous population theory, humans had been living in a dynamic balance where periodic famines weakened the population and then the people succumbed to diseases which were usually accommodated to by a healthy body. Then with diseased people around to form a reservoir for the various diseases to sustain themselves, there would be a great die off from the period of exhaustion and loss of spiritual vigor. Then as things got better the survivors would repopulate the land as quickly as possible, before some other group of people came in and took over.

Periodic famine is a natural condition, but it’s one which Americans haven’t even come close to since 1816, the year without a summer. The world in 2011 has such good food distribution systems that the only famines have been essentially war caused, a way of killing opponents, and the victims might be considered battle causalities. But in a large self-contained literate culture there are written records of numerous famines. One emperor was quoted as saying, “The worst thing about being Emperor is that during a famine, I must decide which large group of good people among my subjects are to get food and which must be left to starve.”

The poison in modern thinking is that everyone has the absolute right to have as many children as they want, and everyone has the absolute right to all the food they want. If that were up to a vote I would be for it, but Mother Nature says no. I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s famous consultation with his cabinet, where they all voted against some proposal. “Twelve Nays one Yea, the Yeas have it.” In this case with Mother Nature standing in for Lincoln, it would be

“Seven billion Yeas and one Nay, the nays have it.”

The 5th most important issue facing humanity is forethought.

Tags

Forethought, human failure, Human forethought, human nature, Responsibility of humans, Reward forethought

Forethought is humanity’s most defining characteristic; it is built into us with our self-created ability to speak. With our imaginations developed by our learning of cultural wisdom through speaking with one another, our ability soars through time and space vastly beyond what any single person could ever aspire to learn in a single lifetime.

When man first spoke to man, how great the stride,
For what was learned by one was help to all;
And one in need could beckon to his side
Another’s hand to help this first man’s fall.

Then we did learn to write and bind our thoughts
Through time and space, on parchment, stone and clay,
Thus we may recall what was once forgot,
And long dead men live with us here today.

But these dead men are soon to die for good,
And live no more in future thoughts of man;
For past thoughts can not be understood,
When there is no more man to understand.

Although the helping hand seemed quite kind,
In the end it brought the end of mankind.

As a world culture, and a humanity-wide society, we must learn to cultivate and reward forward thinking people even more than is already done. Our institutions have done a satisfactory job in the past, and we have grown enormously successful as a species because of our forethought. The patent and copyright systems reward creative thought, and that has permitted individuals to expect great rewards for years of personal exertion, and therefore they willingly put forth those efforts. Also, the democratic political system requires accountability at specified intervals of time, which compels politicians to think ahead so they may be able to justify their actions at the end of their term of office. If they perform poorly at this projected forethought they are soon beaten out of office by competitors.

Some of the responsibility for large-scale social forethought must devolve to the common person, because it ultimately is they who choose their leaders, and it is they who purchase the products of the creators of new products and thus give them power to create further new things. Primarily, it is the young women who define the direction of the genetic drift of humanity and the direction of social change and men who seek to find and implement that change.

We must find ways to reward forethought and cultivate those capable of it.

---

Tsunami Wave off Kanagawa, Japan originated near the coast of America – Hokusai

(Click the thumbnail for a 1920 x 1200 computer wallpaper image.)

 

 

The 2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami (at 38.322 142.369), 129 km off Japan caused catastrophic devastation, neither because of the quake itself, nor because of the tsunami. The property damage and the horrendous loss of life was because the cities and atomic reactors along the ocean did not have adequate sea-walls to defend against a 9.0 Richter quake and the resultant 10 meter tsunami. Many Japanese cities do have these walls, but a wall in one city does no good for a city up the coast which doesn’t have one.

Docking ships at a wharf a kilometer out into deeper water, well beyond the sea-wall, would have allowed those ships to simply ride over the tsunami swell and remain totally unharmed. Also, in a place known to be on a tsunami flood plain there should be solidly built ten meter high retreat towers within a ten minute walk of everyone. This could be a commercially used building, but it would be clearly marked with an external open staircase to the roof and on the side away from the harbor.

Whoever authorized the construction of the fail-possible reactors where they could be hit by a massive earthquake, or a tsunami, certainly deserves a Darwin Award. The world may need the power of atomic reactors, but they must be built in such a way that they can not fail catastrophically. How obvious can something be?

What you and your friends believe controls your actions.

Tags

How to find what you believe, Trustworthiness of information, What to believe, What to not believe, What you probably believe

The most important moments in your day is what you chose to read and watch and whom you choose to interact with. We may be hesitant to think about ourselves as automatons, but the old saying, Monkey see monkey do, is still operative, even with us. We are influenced by what our friends think and do and they too are influenced by that they see and others do. What they think is highly influenced by what they have seen in the media they chose to watch and observed in the people they chose to be with during their daily lives. Therefore to find out what you believe and hence what you will do relative to some particular thing, ask your friends what they are watching, reading and whom they have been visiting with.

What your friends choose to watch, read and do is highly dependent upon where they came from historically and what they chose to study in school. That is easily found out by you and probably already known in detail but what is easily forgotten is how much it influences their thoughts, decisions and behavior and thus how much it influences you.

Most human interaction is conflict resolution in the form of mild argument and discussion of other people’s statements and behavior. It is a process of creating in-group us, versus out-group them, even though the out-group them is recognized as part of our greater in-group us. These other people being discussed are, at least momentarily, out-group so we can look at them more abstractly with our minds. Or so we believe, but for the most part our conversation is just bickering over a common ground based on common assumptions about mutually understood things. That is why on the Trustworthyness Scale it rates such a middle ground TST~5-8 and is only slightly better than news broadcasts for accuracy TST~4. It is supprising that people trust news sources as much as they do because most people from personal experience of being on location of some published news event know how conflicting with their own experience is with the reported views.

We all think of ourselves as independent thinkers and yet if anyone of us carefully observed our friends and compared their prefrences on anything to our own and these compared to humanities preferences they soon find just how controlled by the in-group’s views we really are. And perhaps worst of all our group bases a lot of what we commonly believe on what information our chosen media provides to us. We know it is biased and yet we believe because our friends believe.

Once I saw a news reporter interviewing some upper level but not diplomat level UN person about his thoughts on a New York Times article about the Event being discussed. The UN interviewee said he hadn’t read it. The shocked reporter asked why he missed it. The diplomat said he had other sources and didn’t have time for reading newspapers. The TV guy was clearly shocked, You never read the New York Times? How can you be informed on what’s going on?  UN guy says, I have other sources. The TV guy was dumbfounded repeating himself, uh uh?  Then the UN guy repeats, I have other sources!

What interested me wasn’t that the UN guy had inside information which he depended upon and valued but that he obviously didn’t value the New York Times enough to even bother reading it. This was horrifying to the TV reporter and if the interview hadn’t been live would surely have been edited out. But the insiders information is what drives important decisions and what the newspapers deliver to the public is what sells newspapers. Sometimes there is an overlap of information but not always and even the insiders don’t have all the inside information that the top level insiders possess.

The public’s observations and decisions about events are thus made well after everything important has already happened and new events are being decided by the inside decision makers. Even the insiders of the world are dependent upon their ingroup for their behavior. The thing to be learned is that you should choose carefully who and what you pay attention to and what you interact with. There is an old saying, People believe the newspaper they pay for. This concept can be expanded to everything.

People most value what they pay most for.

McCain and Obama and their future actions and words.

Tags

Demara, impostor, Manchurian Candidate, McCain, Obama, politics, president

McCain and Obama must be looked at for their Manchurian Candidate proclivities. This refers to the possibility that they may have come under the spell of some character distorting influences in their past which may surface during their presidency. Both of them have qualities about their past which are highly suspicious, and which may, or may not, become a problem for them, and more importantly for the public here in the United States, and in the world at large. The events in their past may have made them more qualified or it may have laid the groundwork for disaster. It depends upon how deep the injuries were, and how they responded to and recovered from those injuries. Both of them are to be honored on how well they have been able to rise from seemingly devastating events in their past. These are not trivial things, but events which have utterly destroyed most people who have endured them. Here is a brief look at their well known, and well publicized life histories, and then an attempt to see if there is a disaster waiting to happen. Is there any objective measure whereby one can estimate their relative ability to guide the country, and the world through the coming years of increasing instability?

McCain comes from a high ranking military family where there is a tradition of honor, love of country, and the expectation of responsibility and accountability. These traditions are more inflexible than encountered in most families, and in John’s case were tested beyond the capabilities of anyone to endure when he was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. His body shows the violence which he endured, and which his mind endured also which is not so visible, and there is reason to question how these events would affect his decision making when things get very difficult. There is little doubt that things will get difficult during the next four years.

Obama also has a very strange history that cannot, but have influenced him in some way: perhaps to make him stronger, perhaps to make him more circumspect, perhaps to make him loyal to something which no one can understand, even himself. He was born of a very young American woman, and a Kenyan father who abandoned him as an infant, and was raised by this single mother in the foreign lands of Southeast Asia until his adolescent years. There he grew up as an abandoned half-American in a foreign land attending local schools teaching local traditions. It would appear that because of his outsider status he spent most of his time studying, and became a proficient scholar which stood him in good stead later on when attending Harvard law school. Later his mother abandoned, him to her parents and his teenage years were spent with them, and were probably relatively normal to outward appearance, but by this time with a childhood abroad he wasn’t really a local there either. He wasn’t your typical American youth although by having moved around in several foreign cultures by this time it was second nature for him to master the art of fitting in to a new culture. These may be qualities very valuable for a president, or perhaps not.

In this analysis the attempt is to foresee things which might precipitate serious problems. Is there a possibility that he has those traits of an impostor? There was a famous impostor Ferdinand Demara who was actually a very successful man in many varied occupations, but he had a similar wild childhood of abandonment, and artful compensations. He might have been a good president had he chosen or he may have gone some strange way at a critical time, and abandon the whole responsibility thing as did both his father and his mother. Who knows? But it is a question which should be given some consideration for this most important, and stressful job in the world

John McCain said, “I will defend this country until my dying breath!” Barack Obama couldn’t say that with the same believability, but that may not be what will actually be most helpful to the survival of the world we will be struggling to live in. The statement, “I will maintain the health of this Earth, and its people until my dying breath!” might have been of more long term benefit. That is a statement which Obama could more legitimately make, and be believed. That is a statement which former presidential candidate Al Gore could make, and which the Democratic party is more likely to support than the Republican. That more inclusive statement would be more amenable to long term stability of the world and of the United States.

Which of the two candidates will prove to be the better president is a question which will never be answered, because only one of them will in fact be president, and there will be no comparison, only what ifs. So in a way the question has to be asked now before the events, because even afterwards we will not know. How are we to predict their future actions, but by observing their past actions and their present words? In life it is generally better to observe a person’s past behavior than their present words to know what their future actions will be.

Past actions are the foundation of future actions,

Present words are the foundation of future words.

Measuring the Unmeasurable: Facts

This analysis examines the relationship between facts and various emotional and spiritual experiences, highlighting the complex interplay between objective reality and subjective perception. In some cases, such as exuberant triumph or jubilant satisfaction, the facts of the situation are relatively clear and measurable, grounded in tangible achievements and outcomes. In other cases, such as dreamy intoxication or sublime blessedness, the subjective, internal nature of the experience may resist easy categorization or verification, as the facts of the matter are more psychological, metaphysical, or transcendent than empirical and observable. In the end, the idea of facts in relation to these experiences invites us to reflect on the nature of reality and how both the objective circumstances of our lives and the subjective lens of our own consciousness shape our perception of the world. By recognizing the interplay between these two dimensions, we can perhaps develop a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of the human experience, which honors both the concrete realities of the external world and the rich inner landscape of the mind and spirit. At the same time, we must also remain vigilant against the temptation to conflate subjective perception with objective truth or to use the language of facts to dismiss or invalidate the genuine experiences and perspectives of others. Only by striking a balance between empirical rigor and empathetic understanding can we hope to build a shared understanding of the world grounded in truth and compassion.

---

1. Relieved survival: As people come to terms with their own mortality and the razor-thin line separating life and death, they frequently experience a greater awareness of the fragility and value of life.
2. Reveling riot: The facts surrounding a reveling riot may be complex and contested, as different parties seek to control the narrative and interpret the events through their own ideological lenses, often obscuring the underlying social, economic, and political realities that fueled the unrest.
3. Dreamy intoxication: Due to its subjective nature and the difficulty of generalizing or quantifying it, dreamy intoxication may appear to defy the idea of objective facts.
4. Nympholeptic orgasm: The physiological facts of a nympholeptic orgasm are well-established, involving a complex cascade of hormonal and neurological responses that produce intense sensations of pleasure and release, but the subjective, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the experience remain more elusive and open to interpretation.
5. Joyous communion: The facts of joyous communion may be rooted in the shared values, beliefs, and experiences of the participants, as the sense of unity and connection is often based on a common understanding of the world and one’s place in it, even if that understanding is not always grounded in empirical reality.
6. Jolly merriment: The facts of jolly merriment may be less important than the subjective experience of the participants, as the lighthearted, playful nature of the interaction creates a temporary bubble of shared joy and laughter that may not necessarily reflect the larger realities of the world.
7. High thrill: The facts of high thrill experiences are often grounded in the physical and psychological realities of risk, danger, and bodily arousal, as the adrenaline-fueled intensity of the moment is a direct response to the perceived threats and challenges of the environment.
8. Exuberant triumph: The facts of exuberant triumph are often measurable and quantifiable, as the success and achievement that underlie the experience are typically based on objective criteria and standards, even if the emotional and psychological impact of the victory is more subjective and personal.
9. Jubilant satisfaction: The facts of jubilant satisfaction may be rooted in the tangible, observable outcomes of one’s efforts, as the sense of pride and fulfillment is often tied to the successful completion of a task or the realization of a long-sought goal.
10. Cheerful pleasure: The facts of cheerful pleasure may be simple and straightforward, as the experience of joy and contentment is often triggered by small, everyday moments and interactions that do not necessarily require a larger context or explanation.
11. Contented graciousness: The facts of contented graciousness may be more internal and psychological than external and observable, as the cultivation of inner peace and equanimity is often a personal, subjective process that is not always reflected in one’s outward circumstances or behavior.
12. Delighted fulfillment: The facts of delighted fulfillment may span both the subjective and objective realms, as the sense of deep satisfaction and self-actualization is often grounded in both the tangible achievements of one’s life and the more intangible qualities of personal growth, meaning, and purpose.
13. Sublime blessedness: The facts of sublime blessedness may be more metaphysical and transcendent than empirical and verifiable, as the experience of spiritual unity and enlightenment often involves a direct encounter with a reality beyond the grasp of the rational, discursive mind.
14. Blissful contentment: The facts of blissful contentment may be rooted in the fundamental nature of consciousness itself. The deep peace and happiness that arise from resting in the present moment are often seen as the inherent qualities of the mind, independent of any external circumstances or conditions.
15. Seraphic enlightenment: The facts of seraphic enlightenment may be the ultimate truth of existence itself. The direct realization of the absolute is often described as the final, irreversible awakening to the true nature of reality, beyond all concepts, categories, and dualities.

---