Head in Sand

Not the End of the World

  If you’re one of those convinced that December 21^st will be the end of the world as we know it, shouldn’t you be getting really scared about now? Me personally, I’m not feeling it. I know how close we could be if someone does exactly the wrong thing. But hopefully, no one is crazy enough to unleash nuclear weapons on the world. Hopefully! But there are other terrors that could kill us all just as easily, and it scares me that some of those might be turned loose accidently. But unless it’s a totally devious sneak attack, I don’t feel it coming. Not yet anyway. Now for those of you who think Bible Prophecy will be fulfilled next month….hmmm – No. First of all, Daniel, Jesus and John said that there were several things that had to happen first before Jesus would come back. The main one is that a new temple would be built in Jerusalem where the old one was. There’s one problem there. The Dome of the Rock sits there already and would have to be removed before you could rebuild the Jewish temple. Remove it and that would assuredly be the match that would lite that particular powder keg. Also, there’s the matter of the two witnesses (Elijah and John it has been suggested) killed on the streets of Jerusalem for denouncing the Anti-Christ. And where’s the Anti-Christ in Jerusalem proclaiming to be God?  Haven’t seen any of this on CNN, so I wouldn’t think that particular doomsday scenario is in play yet. Now there are those out there that say we are not ending - just moving to the next level or vibration. I’m still not so sure what they mean by that, and I’ve read all about it. Supposedly we are currently on this fourth level of existence and, if we’re enlightened enough, will move to the fifth level on Dec. 21^st when the solar system exactly aligns with the galactic center. Ok. I’m still not sure what such an alignment would have to do with anything. And I can’t figure out how life would be any different if we were living on another level. Is that place going to be all rainbows and lollipops? I’m not sure because none of them are saying. So the world is not ending anytime soon folks. There are many real problems that we are facing, but not many are helping to put forward real solutions. I think as a country we all have our collective heads stuck firmly into the sand. Waiting for the end to come so we don’t have to work on the hard problems we are facing is not a real solution. I for one will be glad when this particular deadline has passed,

so we can get on with it.

Meat Robots

Mind Over Matter

  Most scientists and many of you out there think that we are nothing more than meat robots, born a blank slate awaiting input from our programmers (parents, society, etc.). Scientists keep probing deeper and deeper into our brains and its chemistry trying to pinpoint our consciousness or our minds. Not able to find anything to measure other than electrical impulses and chemistry, they postulate that there is nothing else to find. And they conclude that when we get here, our brains are indeed a blank slate: a computer hard drive with no operating system installed yet. I heard that same argument when I was in college taking Psychology 101. My professor never had any children, and I had two. I told him that if he had raised a couple of children he would know better. My two children were born with distinct personalities, likes and dislikes, and were completely different from one another. None of which was learned behavior. They manifested these differences in character from day one. So I wasn’t buying the blank slate argument even back then. Arguing the case from either perspective is pretty futile since both sides are pretty steeped in their own belief systems and not likely to come off them by one iota. I argued till I was blue in the face with my college professor, but when it was test time – I put what he wanted to hear…hey, I’m not stupid and I wanted that A. When I see a computer sitting on a table, I can’t look at it and imagine that it didn’t have someone that built it. And when it opens up with windows and says “welcome”, I can’t imagine that it didn’t have a programmer even though I never met one or saw one, but I know without a doubt they ‘re out there somewhere. But all that aside, I can’t help wondering that if we are simply meat robots, why were we programmed by evolution the way we are? It could have gone either way as I see it. We could have been completely rational solving all of our survival issues with pure logic and instinct alone. Why have emotions and feelings to accomplish the same thing? Emotions and feelings are so much more messy and unreliable at times. Why do we need to feel love, hate, happiness, sorrow, grief, etc.? Why would we need any of these at all? Wouldn’t it be better to let logic tell us to just run from danger, fight when it was unavoidable, leave our dead for carrion when the time came and move on. Why have feelings to muddle things up and blur the lines? I love sci-fi and the stories of self-aware robots are among some of my favorite. But I don’t care how much memory we give it, or how much programing we put into it, I don’t expect that there will ever come a time when we in fact do create a truly self-aware robot.

Red Dawn

     Will You Fight?

  One thing that bothers me a little about movies like this is that I'm sure that other countries have game planned the various ways they might come in and take us over. And I'm sure they've looked at every scenario they could think of. But just in case they haven't, its probably not a smart thing to give them any ideas. However, let's just say that another country like North Korea could come in without much of any kind of resistance from our military. For that to happen, our country would have already collapsed financially, and our military all went home because they weren't getting paid. Even then that scenario would not likely hold up, because you would probably get enough unpaid volunteers just from the great states of Tennessee and Texas to man up a pretty good size militia. And you're thinking that, oh, maybe they would do something like they did in the movie and disrupt our whole power grid. Well, I don't see how that would bother our military too much. They're pretty good at fighting in the dark. And I've heard talk of an EMP burst above the country that would take down not only the power grid but anything that needed electricity to run, like all types of communication (other than smoke signals), generators, cars, planes and trains. If you noticed in the movie vehicles and generators were still working. But even with the EMP thing, I know that our military has shielded darn near everything against such an attack. It wouldn't stop our nukes or most of our combat aircraft. So the EMP thing might cause a lot of confusion and panic in the general public but, as soon as we found out who was responsible, they would get nuked.
  But, hypothetically, let's just say they managed to get a sizable number of boots on the ground without much military resistance. Most people I asked said that they would fight if it came to a scenario like that. That's a pretty easy thing to say when you're sitting in your recliner watching the ball game or comfortably sitting in front of your computer contentedly pecking away at the key board. I'm not so sure there would be all that many that would actually take up all the weapons they could find and head for the hills (or marsh, swamp, or piney woods around here). Many of those that did, would probably just get themselves dead in a very short period of time. Let's just hope I'm wrong. Regardless, even if this scenario is a very remote one, would you really want to be caught flat footed and unarmed by your own government ahead of time? Think about it when you're going along with those in our government that want to get rid of our right to bear arms. I do not consider my self an extreme right wing sort of person. I am very liberal on some things, conservative on others and generally an independent politically. But I would never voluntarily give up my right to bear arms. Those that have historically, lost their freedom pretty rapidly afterwards. Our last couple of Presidents have steam rolled over us in the dark of night when no one was paying attention. Or they by-passed Congress altogether with Executive Orders and taken many of our rights already without much of a fight from any of us. But if you let them take the right to bear arms too...you will quickly find yourself someone's prisoner. Then you will be like the Palestinians throwing rocks at tanks and airplanes when they start poking and prodding you like cattle to get you to do their bidding. So my advice is to chose your battles wisely and hope you never have to fight. But just in case, you better make sure you have something in your hand to fight with.

Infinity

“To Infinity and Beyond”

  The quote above from Buzz Lightyear sounds good, right?  But could you possibly say anything more meaningless? To infinity? If a thing is infinite, by definition you could never reach it. It has no borders. And to not only reach it but go beyond, well that’s just absurd to the max.  As we speak, the whole question of infinity is still being debated when it comes to the size of the universe. To me that’s a little absurd, too, as by definition when you say universe you mean all of the cosmos. Is there anything else? But here’s the essence of the debate. Some cosmologists believe or have believed that the universe is infinite going out in every direction infinitely (no end or beyond anywhere). They essentially call this the flat or level universe. Modern day cosmologists and proponents of the so called “Big Bang Theory” envision a curved or round universe that expands, carrying space along with it, into a larger (who knows how large?) volume of nothing. The word universe comes from Latin where uni means one and verse (versus) which means turn into. So literally it means “turn into one”. Which is another way of saying everything we see out there is one thing. I’ll give you that with reservations. Anyway, I have a problem with the whole Big Bang concept in that it is described like a balloon inflating with a bunch of dots all over the surface of it. The dots (each one representing a galaxy) all get further and further away from each other as the balloon continues to inflate.  And what we think of as space is carried along with this expansion. Since we can only travel through space we could never go “outside” of this growing bubble to check and see what’s there (by their definition there is nothing there…no thing…not even space.) I often wonder that as we travel outward, what is left behind? The volume in the middle of the balloon…is it now space too or does it return to being nothing? If we had an unimaginably fast ship could we travel across this area and go directly to the opposite side of the expanding bubble from us? Or do we have to travel the circumference and go all the way around to get to the same point? And if we’re on the surface of the expanding bubble, when we look away from the center of the bubble, why don’t we see nothing but, well…nothing? Looking back towards the center we see the earlier versions of the universe as it was in the past supposedly. But if that’s the case, and as they say the light from that point has taken billions of years to reach us across such vast distances, then are we traveling faster than light essentially outrunning our own shadow? I thought Einstein said that wasn’t possible? As it stands today, it seems that when you point a telescope in any direction you find galaxies. Countless billions of them! They say that when you peer deep enough into space you start seeing things like quasars and proto galaxies and it is said you are seeing the past of our universe as it was many billions of years ago. Maybe. In that case how do we even know for sure what the universe looks like right this minute? Is it even still there as we speak? No way to tell for sure. We could just be riding along on a spark like an ember from a fire rising up into the dark night sky. Everything we see around us is just afterimages of similar sparks that have already faded into oblivion. The question is how long do we have before our spark too fades into nothing? The following passage is from Wikipedia:

 “If, on the other hand, the universe were not curved like a sphere but had a flat topology, it could be both unbounded and infinite. The curvature of the universe can be measured through multipole moments in the spectrum of the cosmic background radiation. As to date, analysis of the radiation patterns recorded by the WMAP spacecraft hints that the universe has a flat topology. This would be consistent with an infinite physical universe. The Planck spacecraft launched in 2009 is expected to record the cosmic background radiation with 10 times higher precision, and will give more insight into the question of whether the universe is infinite or not.”

I guess we will just have to wait and see what the evidence tells us. But for my money, I’m betting on the flat infinite model.

What in the World?

What is the World Coming To?

  From space, Earth is a beautiful place. Makes you glad you're already here, right? And when you visit places of beauty like mountains, beaches, forests, and lakes you take a deep breath and try to breathe in that eneffable something that you always feel when you're there. Just to take a little bit of it back with you when you inevitably have to return to your everyday, humdrum life. Where you live, its not so beautiful. The air is not so fresh and clean. Well, at least for many of us. There are a lucky few. But the world as a whole is still quite an amazing place. And yet we humbly must admit that it is only a small oasis in the vast desert of space where cold, hostile emptiness reigns supreme. Yet don't we all feel a tugging to sail that emptiness and see what else is out there? We can't even wait for our technology to catch up and make that dream come true. We keep building bigger and bigger telescopes to try and cheat and see what's there from here. Judging from the way things stand on Earth today, I would say we are not ready to go out there. How could we possibly offer our selves up in friendship to what ever kind of life we might find elsewhere in the galaxy when we can't even befriend our neighbors right here on Earth? When all men can sit down together in peace and plan our adventure outward, then we will be ready to make the trip. Until that day, our number one priority should be to get our own house in order. The world is our cradle, and we should learn to take care of it. What a great sadness it would be if we had to leave it before we were ready because we had rendered it no longer livable. Or worse, never got a chance to leave at all.

  With that said, how long can Mother Earth sustain an ever increasing human population? A thousand years, a hundred, a few more decades, or have we already reached the tipping point? Over 25,000 people die from hunger every day. I think the tipping point was reached some time ago, don't you? So as far as I'm concerned, I think its well past time for us to beat our weapons into plow shears. I hear all these theories that the so called illuminati have a plan to get rid of most of us as their way of solving the problem. And the constant beating of the war drums is just one part of that pogrom. Is that the best we can do? The only solution great minds can come up with? I hope not. My greatest fear is that either Mother Earth will turn on us or human insanity will before we put our heads together and figure this thing out. So where do we start? Do we wait for someone else to get the ball rolling? Or should we start making that effort here and now, just you and I? The problem is obvious. The sollution is not. Got any ideas? Lets hear them. There's a place below called "Comments" where we can at least nudge the ball and see if we can make it roll. So how about it?

Secede or Not to Secede

Should We Stay or Should We Go

  I have gone to the government website called “We The People” and saw the many petitions submitted there. The website states that any petition submitted there that gains more than 25,000 signatures would be addressed by the government. Many people from various states have posted petitions for their states to peacefully be allowed to secede. Most of them only have two or three thousand signatures so far. Texas, on the other hand, has 106,870 signatures so far and counting. The question has been raised, “Is it legal for a state to secede?” Many Texans think it is, but they are wrong. When the North won the civil war, they made it illegal for any state to secede going forward. This includes Texas. So the only way for that to happen is to fight another war and be victorious. Not likely to happen and we couldn’t win. So it all boils down to a lot of talk and wishful thinking, but it ain’t gonna happen folks. Not unless the country completely collapses, and then all bets are off. I fear, however, that in the event of a complete financial breakdown and collapse that some other more powerful nation would swoop in and take us over. Or perhaps the U.N. (our De Facto government anyway) would step in and do it. Which may be the plan to start with and the reason we will be allowed to crash and burn. So my advice is to not waste your time and energy worrying about or advocating secession. Better to try to work towards fixing the broken government we’re stuck with now. And quick, before it’s too late. If it’s not already.

Countdown to Dec. 21st

Countdown to Dec. 21

  I don’t know guys. I have mixed emotions about this whole end of the world talk out there. Honestly, if our time is up for real, I’m ready to go. But my gut tells me this is going to be another one of those Y2K scenarios. I have to confess that on Dec. 31^st , 1999, I went to bed a little apprehensive. I made no preparations, however, to face all the supposed doomsday prophecies. Worst case scenario, as far as I was concerned, was that my old clunker computer might not work when I woke up the next day. So first thing I did when I woke up on Jan. 1^st 2000 was to fire it up and log on. It worked just as well as it always did. The electricity was still on, and my bank card still worked at the bank. The whole thing fizzled. My gut tells me this coming winter solstice will come and go just like all the rest have. So don't postpone your Christmas shopping until after Dec. 21st.  

  I did read this one weird article that said that Dec. 21^st is a deadline given by India to the rest of the world to come clean on what they know about aliens and UFO’s or else they will. The article went on to say that even the aliens, that supposedly the U.S. has been in touch with and has treaty agreements with since the Eisenhower administration, have also given this date as a target date for making their presence known. If the world governments don’t come clean, then the aliens will. Now that is something to look forward to as far as I'm concerned. So, either the world is going out with a bang, or the aliens are coming. I’m cool with either one. How about you?