Reverse Communism

Reverse Communism
12/28/05

From the first, I thought that the sign on Bill Clinton’s wall (“It’s the economy, stupid.”) was demeaning.  This did not diminish the truth in it.  I realize that Clinton was trying to depict the economy as the top factor in determining who gets elected President of the United States---and that this fact tends to get inadvertently overlooked in the exuberance of the campaign process.  On the other hand, I would regard Clinton as generally neither stupid nor forgetful (he has rarely acted that way, and then only selectively and once spectacularly).  The “stupid” part bothers me, but that does not lessen the importance of his admonition.
  
I first wrote a version of this essay in 2004, as inspired by an event on February 25.  That was the day Alan Greenspan strongly advised Congress to consider cutting Social Security benefits for future seniors as a way to ensure that our mounting budget deficit does not overwhelm us.  It actually could have been one of any number of incidents that set me to writing.  I had been formulating this essay for years.  This is not about the wisdom of Greenspan’s remarks.  This is about the swelling national debt with all its ramifications.  This is also about the structure we have for handling the economy and how it relates to our political system.

We found ourselves at the beginning of this decade back in the old situation of the late 1980’s, when there seemed to be no end to our mounting national debt, and the president at that time appeared clueless as to how to stop it.  Subsequently, Bill Clinton became president, raised taxes, cut spending, and left us with a budget surplus.  While all this was going on, the economy soared.  It may be a coincidence that the economy soared, but you must realize that the real significance of this entails its flip side.  In fact, while taxes were raised, the economy did not crash.  That is important to consider.  Taxes were raised, and the economy did not crash---it even soared.  This led to subsequent paradoxes:  the next president came along at a time when the stock market was about to go down.  This probably was a coincidence, too.  A stock market correction was due both from short-term and long-term perspectives.  Then the current president, using the downturn as an excuse, ignored the fact that in the ‘90’s the economy did well no matter if taxes were higher---and he slashed taxes under the guise of stimulating the economy.  Then he professed the wisdom that if you are going to cut taxes, you must cut the budget and thus cut federal services, and hopefully the stimulated economy would then fill the coffers because of higher tax receipts.  But in practice  he went on to ask for and get historic amounts of money for government programs other than those that would help the disadvantaged.  Then he got us involved in overseas military operations at huge expense, and he regarded that as a side issue, budget-wise.  Nonetheless, he used the war as the reason for the deficit, as if we should expect to run a deficit in this situation (a major difference between his father and him is that his father was oblivious and he is non-chalant).  His claims are apparently meant to divert our attention away from the fact that he cut off the very source of revenue that should have paid for it all:  the United States Treasury tax base.

Am I the only one who has remembered that the economy did very well in the ‘90’s right after taxes were raised?  Surely the current president’s administration has some very insightful people within it who should know this fact.  If they do remember the ‘90’s economy and the higher tax base and the budget surplus, then they must have had some other reason for cutting taxes.  This begs the question as to who stands to gain the most from an income tax cut, and over what time frame they will realize it, and why it needs to be that way.

In my opinion, having a lower national debt is better from the standpoint of not having to use future national resources (the tax base) for debt service.  That frees up more money for infrastructure.  There is a contrarian point of view that says that running up debt is good, because it allows you to have your infrastructure and programs now and pay for them while you’re using them.  To me, the flaw in this line of reasoning is that there is a limit as to how much debt you can accrue before you get overwhelmed by it.  The need for infrastructure and programs is almost limitless and likely will continue to be that way in the future, in ways that we may not even imagine today.  By running up a huge deficit, our nation is jeopardizing its ability to upgrade our infrastructure meaningfully in the decades to come.  It is far healthier to pick and choose from the current menu of things we want in order to pick what we really need the most---and do so within our present-day ability to pay for it.  Today’s president apparently does not see it that way.  If he thinks about this analytically at all, apparently he considers only the short-term picture, to the exclusion of the concept of who pays back the debt later.

If you examine the big picture of our national economy, you can see that our major trend---transcending liberal and conservative presidential administrations, congressional balance, and other long-term factors---has been towards the dominance of large corporations governed by elite board members of high business acumen. These large corporations are overseen only loosely by governments, and they seem to be able to operate without external governance at all in many cases.  Large corporations, managed correctly, are able to take advantage of huge economies of scale and thus amass wealth almost exponentially.  They have a tremendous economic advantage over smaller operations, from the standpoint of wielding power.

Mom and Pop stores nonetheless continue to exist alongside the behemoths, and this might actually be useful for the large corporations.  Some Mom and Pops can survive and eke out a living.  This creates the illusion that the large corporations are not so damaging after all.  Likewise, some large corporations have made bad business judgments legally or illegally, and rarely some of these big companies have fallen hard and dramatically.  This also creates an illusion that large corporations are not so invincible after all and thus are not so threatening.

Illusions aside, evidence of the power of large corporations is all around us.  There also is little question that the rich find it easier to get richer than the rest of us.  But where does that leave the poor?  I think that the hard-core poor have little to do with the issue.  Certainly, there have always been people of low advantage, and there probably will continue to be.  These people have little to lose, and so their downside is shallow.  In the United States, the “traditional poor” consists of a bruised minority but a relatively small one.  The current administration certainly has not helped them, but relatively speaking they do not comprise the demographic that is the most in jeopardy.  Instead, we need to focus on the “ordinary person”.  In this context, when conditions are such that the rich get richer exponentially, ordinary people do not have the mechanisms to do so.  This has always been the case, but lately the people who comprise the small minority of the wealthy are becoming richer much more easily, as enabled by a government run by the elite for the elite.

Really, I think having more rich people is not the problem.  Rather, it is the meaning of the wealth in this country and what you can do with it that is a serious threat to democracy.  For as with monarchs in the past, wealth can buy power.  In the United States, power is wielded in more subtle ways than that exercised by a king or queen.  In our country, power is exerted most heavily 1) with political bribes (and by this I refer to the hiring of lobbyists, making campaign contributions that wield influence and solidify later favors, and other such legal payments that make our country “the democracy that never was”); 2) in the ability to buy up the competition; 3) in the nonprofit sector, where huge amounts of money can be controlled and channeled to recipients preferred by the wealthy to the exclusion of others who might be a threat or who the wealthy just do not like; and 4) in the disproportionately easy ability to grow existing wealth into even more, overwhelmingly larger wealth.

So who stands to gain the most from a tax cut, and over what time frame will they realize it, and why does it need to be that way?  Those who have the most money stand to gain the most from a tax cut.  They realize the benefits starting immediately.  It has to be that way so as to plant the seeds for their ability to attain even greater, massive wealth so as to have even more power over ordinary people, and the sooner the better.

The government of our nation throughout all administrations has for decades been heavily biased to enable the above process.  The present-day administration has only served to exacerbate this enablement many times over (for this is truly the presidential administration “of and for the entitled” in just about every way).  Getting ourselves entirely free from this long-existing enablement, if we were to try to do it, is bound to be very difficult.  The elite have such a grip on the government, it may well be impossible to wrench it loose.

These things that are lately getting extreme are being made to seem right by hiding within legitimate capitalism.  Do I not have the right to make a profit and become wealthy?  Of course I do, and so do you.  The problem is not with this right per se, but with the wealthy individual’s legalized ability to undermine democracy using the power that wealth brings.

Whether we in this country really want to have a true democracy would have to be the subject for a different essay.  But at least in order to salvage some semblance of democracy, with the 2004 election we should have mitigated the current extreme trend by removal of the source of its acceleration.  In the 2004 presidential election, however, we did not do so.  Too bad for us.

I maintain that removal of the current administration would have been the right move.  The alternative candidate was not perfect but did not support elitism nearly as much.  And after all, we had few other choices.  In terms of the presidency, in this country we have all the options of a single-pole-single-throw switch (i.e., either on or off, one way or the other).  Removal of the strongly accelerating influence would certainly have taken some of the heat off and would have been a good beginning.  Beyond that, there is much work to be done to decrease the ease with which the wealthy can wield such heavy influence on the system for the sake of perpetuating their own influence.

Such a remedy, to be most effective, should not only dismantle the mechanisms of wielding influence by the elite, but it should also address the mechanisms that can enable those of lesser means to be able to build more wealth.  After all, it surely would be the most constructive and desirable plan to allow the vast majority of the people of this country to be wealthy.  I like to call this “reverse communism”.  Communism entails the re-distribution of wealth and the setting up of systems whereby everyone is homogenized, less wealthy, disempowered, and vulnerable to runaway corruption.  I define reverse communism as being where ordinary individuals and poor people are given every opportunity to attain wealth.  Only the legitimately disabled, those not wanting to participate, or people aspiring to be non-productive citizens would be left behind.  The truly disabled would need a support structure to meet basic needs.  The pathological loners could be left alone.  The latter group could be then offered barely comfortable services for sustenance and afforded a continual invitation to join the ranks of the educated and productive.

A United States with this high quality a populace would surely be far wealthier than even today but with much less economic volatility and a greater ability to live within its means.  A highly educated citizenry would afford our country a sound reason for behaving more like a democracy.  Our penal system would likely not be so over-taxed.  Then we would be able to focus more of our resources on taking care of our truly disabled, providing for universal top-flight educational opportunities for all, maintaining a state-of-the-art infrastructure, fostering a well-funded medical research sector, and developing an advanced program to teach disadvantaged nations how to incorporate our elements of success into their cultures, too.  And we could balance our national budget once again.

Reverse communism would work like this.  Education would be compulsory.  The social service sector would be expanded and empowered to customize appropriate educational circumstances for outliers.  The social service would also have criteria for determining those who are gaming the system and to channel these people into an environment where there are incentives against parasitism and in favor of gainful employment.  Education for grades 1--12 would be free for everyone, with state-of-the-art facilities and well-educated teachers.  The teachers would have the power to achieve order in the classroom.  Discipline would be non-corporal but dreadful, such as being locked up in a room where completion of an assignment is the only way to get released.  Special schools with even more intense social services would be available for those who cannot fit in the usual educational environment.  College or vocational school would not be free but inexpensive enough for everyone desiring it to attain.  To those who would complain that such a system would be “too expensive”, I would only point to the hugely expensive consequences of not having a highly educated public that is capable of attaining wealth and stability.  Intuitively, a population consisting mostly of highly productive families capable of generating wealth is bound to raise our nation’s prosperity exponentially compared with an unstable, low-income populace.

At the schools, intensive courses on all available techniques for saving and investing money would be compulsory.  At that time, the philosophy of taking the long-term approach to attaining wealth would be taught.  That is not all.  The big picture also demands stable families.  Personal responsibility would also be a major subject in the schools to be taught annually and in more sophisticated ways with each advancing year.  So would teaching the subject of the characteristics of, underlying mechanisms of, and remedies for abusive families.  Insight into these areas would be extremely valuable.  This could well set the stage for a higher preponderance of stable, well-educated graduates who possess the skill set and philosophy for attaining substantial wealth, after about 20 years.  There is a counterargument that says that you can teach all you want, but you cannot cause learning to take place.  I agree, but I submit that this is no excuse for not teaching.  Tuning up the classroom environment to where there is mutual respect and also compulsory, expected results as well as tangible, standardized consequences for failure to achieve should also dramatically increase the tendency for students actually to learn the material.

At the same time, our national election system would be revised, to where those running for office would have to do so in the same way and to the same degree as everyone else.  That way, a person’s intelligence, management style, philosophy, and platform would be easier to compare with those of all other candidates.  Thereafter, who can buy the services of the best marketing company would be less of a factor in elections.  In addition, federal and state surcharges would exclusively pay for campaigns.  All adult individuals and all for-profit corporations would pay the surcharge based upon gross income.  There would be no other means of campaign finance.  Bribing a candidate or public official would mandate a minimum 30 year prison sentence without parole.  Boring?  Yes, but fair to a fault, and it has a big chance to release us from the clutches of the elite.

Finally, our federal budget would be balanced, by law.

The above may entail some idealistic elements, but I firmly believe that all of it is realistic and represents much of what we must do and can do if we have the national resolve.  The first step is to rid ourselves of the immediate negative force directed against the ordinary individual.  During the next presidential election, we must put someone in office who is not such an intense elitist.  That would make the next steps much easier to enact.

We must do this because if we do not, our economy is in jeopardy in extensive ways.  As for democracy, I say that in this country democracy is not in jeopardy, for it actually has never existed so far.  Reverse communism has a chance to allow us to have a democratic nation for the very first time.  To me, the economy and democracy are intrinsically intertwined, but the economy is the bottom line.  The structure of the economy can create a cadre of the affluent who are able to buy votes, but it does not have to.  The structure of the economy can make anyone wealthy who wants to be, and it does not have to allow elitists to have a louder voice than anyone else.

I agree with Clinton.  It is the economy.  As for the “stupid” part, let us structure our educational system to enable us to deal with that.

© srman07, 2004, 2005

On Being Labeled a Liberal

On Being Labeled a Liberal
12/18/05

An e-mail document circulating lately got in my InBox, sent by one of my friends who appears to have a certain amount of disdain for “liberals”.

I read the piece called “18 ways to be a good liberal” and found it a mean-spirited attempt to stereotype people who see the world differently from the writer of the “18 ways”.  To me, it displays simmering anger over diversity.  Sadly, this is the nature of our polarized society in the early 21st century.

It seems to me that the conservative movement has effectively demonized the term “liberal” to mean something that it does not and has sensitized many people into feeling that “conservative” is safe while “liberal” is a dirty word.  However, I do not feel safe under this Republican regime.  For instance, running deep budget deficits is anything but conservative or safe.  Republicans are currently being reckless with our nation’s finances, and that certainly is not a trait that meets my definition of conservatism.

But at any rate, I approached the list with curiosity, wondering how much of it applied to me.  So here I have gone down the list in order to find out.

18 Ways To Be A Good Liberal [by unknown e-mail assailant] [and by the way, I corrected the document’s glaring grammatical and punctuation errors that reflect poorly on the assailant’s educational level]
1. You have to be against capital punishment but support abortion on demand.I personally am in favor of both; the former when there is absolutely no doubt as to guilt, and for the purpose of not giving the guilty party the satisfaction of being able to live to represent his or her perverse philosophy; and the latter because of deep concerns about overpopulation, poverty, domestic abuse, and family dysfunction in general, all of which are caused or compounded by having unwanted children.2. You have to believe that businesses create oppression and governments create prosperity.  I believe that some businesses oppress when they are unethical; other businesses do not oppress; some governments oppress, and some enable prosperity (some do both at the same time).  Certainly, the United States has structured financial laws to enable innovation, commerce, and prosperity to a great extent---even more so than, say, Japan or Russia, which are no slouches, either.  Our society’s wealth attests to the success of this structuring.  But we do need to be able to deal better with unethical behavior within both business and government.  3. You have to believe that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are more of a threat than U.S.      nuclear weapons technology in the hands of Chinese and North Korean communists.  
I think that these two things are like apples and oranges.  And the writer of the “18 things” is being so shallow as to exclude mentioning what guns are actually a threat to.  I think the biggest threats coming from guns are in letting them get into the hands of a third party (in particular, a youth), in letting them be ready to fire when handled by the untrained, in allowing them to be readily purchased by gang members, and in not stopping known criminals from buying them.  I think it is unconscionable to allow loopholes in our laws so that anyone can buy a gun at a gun show without a background check.  I think that existing laws are wrong when they allow small handgun manufacturers to cater to the desires of street gangs while acting innocent of any intent.  Registered gun ownership by responsible people who only want to hunt or to defend themselves against assailants, burglars, and poisonous snakes in the house is fine with me.

As to the nuclear issue, how can the U.S. be so incompetent as to allow its nuclear weapons technology to be stolen by China and North Korea?  And for that matter, why is the U.S. continuing to pursue aggressive nuclear weapons deployment?  We should be peace brokers and disseminators of good will, in my view.  We are a far cry from that at the present time, and I would wager that we have never been like that to any great extent.  If we increase our weaponry, we can expect others to do the same, especially nowadays when the leadership of our nation does not exude a facade of trust, unlike in previous times. 4. You have to believe that there was no art before federal funding.

This one seems so mindless to me that it is not worth answering to any great extent.  It ignores the economics of art and tries to depict “liberals” as naïve and uneducated.  Instead, ignoring art’s economics is in itself naïve and suggests poor grades in history.  Money from some source is needed to sustain the artist to allow creativity to blossom.  The marketplace is not enough.  Federal funding, state funding, local funding, private foundations, and individuals all are needed for nurturing culture.  Private funding is much larger than government funding, but government grants balance things by having different selection criteria than does the private sector. 5. You have to believe that global temperatures are less affected by cyclical changes in the earth's      climate and      more affected by soccer moms driving SUV's. The person writing this one clearly is ignoring science and has missed the point entirely.  We are all subject to the patterns that develop in nature, cyclical or not.  However, SUV’s and power plants that operate on fossil fuel are altering our planet’s climate, and this time it is not nature’s workings but instead it is the fault of humans.  We have other sources of energy that we can use that would not do such harm, and the people of the United States are being negligent by not endeavoring to change over to them as rapidly as possible.  Any consequences of such human-induced climate changes are our responsibility, not Mother Nature’s.  The person writing Number 5 apparently began being negligent years ago when he or she failed to be attentive in science class.
6. You have to believe that gender roles are artificial, but being homosexual is natural.
There is plenty of evidence already that gender exists as a spectrum in nature, homosexuals are born that way (which would very well qualify as being natural), and all sorts of variability exists in brain structure that will determine our inclinations in many ways including gender.  I think that gender roles are to a degree learned (for instance, women may be conditioned by society to think that they could never be baseball players or to think that they must wear veils in public) but also to a great extent are natural, too, such as how little boys typically gravitate to engineering-related toys, while little girls typically gravitate towards nurturing toys, even if they are not under the influence of adults.  Exceptions to these typical patterns spice things up, but this nation has not yet come to terms with recognizing how people still can do things typical of their subgroups, while at the same time dealing with the reality that talking about stereotypes is taboo.7. You have to believe that the AIDS virus is spread by a lack of federal funding. I call this one another mean-spirited low blow.  This country gets an “F” in personal responsibility, and our society is to blame for that.  Federal funding has little or nothing to do with it.  However, our government reflects our society and enables personal irresponsibility.  Personal responsibility is an individual choice that transcends governmental programs.  Nonetheless, our government can be instrumental in funding research for preventing or eliminating HIV, in coordinating the effort to eradicate the disease, and in funding public awareness programs.  Our government would do well if it stopped rewarding irresponsible behavior and established a program that helps foster personal responsibility (which then might persuade some people to choose to act responsibly).  We have a long way to go before we ever get there.      
8. You have to believe that the same teacher who can't teach 4th-graders how to read is somehow      qualified to teach those same kids about sex. This one reeks of cynicism.  But more to the point:  if this nation did not discount its youth so thoroughly, we would have an excellent educational system with teachers that are more than qualified to teach both subjects.  In my opinion, we would be a lot better off educating our children about sex both at home and at school.  Children tend to make mistakes despite getting all the right information, but it is just so much worse when they do not get any information at all.  Statistically, parents are woefully inadequate at educating their children about sex.  Even if parents were adequate, I think it is important that children hear the same thing from an independent party, also. 9. You have to believe that hunters don't care about nature, but PETA activists do.

I am uncertain if PETA activists care about nature, but they certainly care about non-human animals.  Some large corporations have demonstrated that they will treat animals intended for human consumption with impunity just for the sake of minimizing costs.  The federal government and society in general would turn a blind eye toward this.  Animal rights activists have caused a higher level of humane treatment of animals within the industry.  However, sometimes these activists are too picky as to what they want.  I imagine that the reason for this is that they largely are vegetarians and practice anthropomorphism with abandon.  We should be able to expect that a reasonable person who is not a vegetarian would want animals targeted for human consumption to be treated humanely and not tortured or subjected to substantial pain.  Being vegetarian is a personal choice.  It is incorrect, in my opinion, to assert that humans are naturally vegetarian and have become addicted to animal flesh by exposure to it.  I think it is quite the opposite.  Humans are omnivores.  The evidence is all around us.  Humans are capable of it, and we largely do it (eat both flesh and vegetables, that is).  Those who are vegetarians are that way by choice for any number of reasons, not the least of which is a tendency to project human characteristics upon every other animal, pets and livestock alike.  I certainly respect their right to be that way, but reserve my right to be an omnivore.  I also want my luncheon meat to have been raised with respect along the way. 10. You have to believe that self-esteem is more important than actually doing something to earn      it.
How perverse is this?  You either have self-esteem or you do not.  Neither the government nor anyone else can give it to you as a gift. 11. You have to believe that Mel Gibson spent $25 million of his own money to make "The Passion      Of The Christ" for financial gain only. I think that Mr. Gibson was already pretty rich and secure when he decided to branch out into producing a Christian masterpiece.  I imagine (but do not know) that he has justified his profits by creating a fund to do more such works or to finance humanitarian projects.  I suspect that he was not unhappy over the profits and that he took a healthy slice of them to fund his lifestyle.  For financial gain only?  Hardly---he had a goal, and that was to push the Christian agenda.  Making a lot of money was just icing on the cake.  By the way, “The Passion of the Christ” is an example of a major work of art that received no federal funding. 
12. You have to believe the NRA is bad, because it supports certain parts of the Constitution, while      the ACLU is good, because it supports certain parts of the Constitution.
This person needs to flip the coin over.  He or she, using biting sarcasm against the dreaded “liberals”, appears to forget that he or she must believe that the ACLU is bad, because it supports certain parts of the Constitution, while the NRA is good, because it supports certain parts of the Constitution.  I believe both of these organizations are important, because they represent opposing viewpoints and cause us to debate the issues before we decide what to do.   
13. You have to believe that taxes are too low, but ATM fees are too high. I think any ATM fee is too high a fee.  With regard to taxes, I suspect but cannot prove that the writer of these “18 ways” would probably be the first to complain if certain governmental services were suddenly unavailable because there were no funds.  I would not be the first to complain but would instead be upset about the funding cut.  I believe there is a disconnect among sectors within the brains of those that think that taxes should be lower but that we should have all these programs anyway, including wars.  Many of these people think that the only reason why things are so expensive is because of waste within the programs.  Schools are a prime example of this.  In certain states, the average amount spent per child is in the neighborhood of $4,500 per year.  A nearby private school with world-class facilities has a tuition that costs 2 to 3 times that much.  And then ironically there are complaints about waste in the school systems and calls for the school budgets to be trimmed even more.  No, what we need is balanced budgets, accountable lawmakers and bureaucrats, and independent watchdog oversight organizations with power over those who overspend or divert money to serve their own objectives instead of the common good.  And then we need to provide the tax money to fund education so that everyone has the opportunity to go to schools that are excellent and equivalent to the private schools.
14. You have to believe that Margaret Sanger and Gloria Steinem are more important to American      history than Thomas Jefferson, Gen. Robert E. Lee, and Thomas Edison.
Again, apples and oranges.  All these people are important in their own individual ways.  And does the writer of the “18 ways” want to be selective about history, too?  Surely, all of these people have their dark sides, and this includes George Washington as well.  When will the history books tell the whole story?
15. You have to believe that standardized tests are racist, but racial quotas and set-asides are not.I believe we will stop having racism when we all individually embrace everyone else as equals despite our differences.  From the standpoint of government’s role in education, I believe quotas, etc., are not the answer.  Instead, the provision of mandatory education available to everyone, uniformly high school quality, strong advocacy by teachers that we respect one another, effective but non-abusive discipline standards, and tangible consequences for not taking personal responsibility are important functions of government.  These would likely result in fewer governmental services’ being necessary after about 20 years with such a system in place.  I am not holding my breath waiting for the day when we implement these changes, however.
16. You have to believe that the only reason socialism hasn't worked anywhere it's been tried is      because the right people haven't been in charge. I believe there are several European nations that are much more socialistic than is the United States, and their systems work well to a large extent.  However, no matter what the system is, it really does help to have people in government who are well-meaning, who make decisions that serve the greater good, and who are very ethical.  In general, our elected officials do not meet these descriptions all of the time. 17. You have to believe that homosexual parades displaying drag, transvestites, and bestiality      should be constitutionally protected and manger scenes at Christmas should be illegal. I believe that the person who wrote this one is all mixed up.  Homosexual parades on the street are protected by the Constitution, and Christmas parades on the street are protected by the Constitution.  If this person meant that Christmas displays at the public courthouse should be protected by the Constitution to the exclusion of other displays, would that same person think that it is all right that an Islamic display should also be protected at the courthouse, if only the Islamic display is allowed and not a Christian one also?  Assuming any such displays are allowed at the courthouse at all (and I favor that they not be), should a homosexual display be allowed at the courthouse and not a heterosexual one?  Certainly not.  Public places are for all of the public.  Christians do not have world rights over everyone else, despite the fact that many Christians profess to be the Chosen People and would use this belief to strong-arm everyone else---strong-arm in a charitable, Christian way, of course.
      18. You have to believe that this message is a part of a vast, right wing conspiracy.

Not at all.  I think the message only reflects a culture of intolerance, egocentricity, and narcissism which is widespread throughout our nation, especially nowadays.

There.  Let me see, how did I do?  Certainly I do not have much in common philosophically with the writer of the “18 things”.  Whether or not that makes me a “liberal” by anyone’s definition is debatable.  Besides, the points I advocate largely fit in the area of personal responsibility, accountability, honesty, and serving the greater good.  Attaching a label to anyone in order to try to belittle that person is that last thing I would like to see.  I prefer to take the high road.  I think that is where I should leave this subject to “rest in peace”.

© 2005, srman07

Penguins

Penguins
12/11/05

Several months ago, I had the pleasure of seeing the recently-released highly-acclaimed movie about some penguins in Antarctica.  It was a very enjoyable and thought-provoking film.

I think that the movie fascinated me more with what it did not address than with what it did.  Also, the spin that the directors used in apparently trying to make the movie more endearing to audiences was interesting.  I shall address the latter first.

Humans tend to regard other animals with an anthropocentric slant.  Saying that a dog who is licking you is “kissing” you is one example.  Animal analysts agree that actually the dog likes the salty flavor of your skin.  The dog is not showing you love but is really getting something it wants---another treat.   The dog must be comfortable with you so as to lick you rather than bite you, but being comfortable does not translate into love.  It is a kind of canine hidden agenda to want your salt.  The human interpretation is hidden from the dog, too, since the dog likely does not know the human thinks there is kissing going on, even if it senses that the human does not mind being licked.  Likewise in the penguin film, from the beginning the narrator appears to be trying to make a love story out of a documentary about a non-human animal.  I think doing so is thoroughly anthropomorphic.

But what is love?  Many of us seem to know intuitively what love is and have experienced it.  But trying to put your finger on it, particularly in attempting to compare what humans do as opposed to other animals, is a challenge.  According to a recent version of a popular dictionary, love can vary from one extreme to the other.  The range spans from the kind of affection that we associate with “brotherly love” all the way to the passionate devotion, sexual hunger, and yearning for another human that can make two people want to become united forever.  Are we trying to ascribe any part of this spectrum to penguins?  It certainly seems that the makers of the movie are attempting to do so.

In the movie, mates stood facing one another with “eyelids” squinched and necks slowly and gently alternating between straight up and bent down, occasionally nuzzling one another.  My interpretation of this certainly includes affection.  Clearly, these two birds were not at odds with one another.  Whether this represents love in the human sense is unclear to me.  Not seen in the movie was the sex (which would have actually been interesting to get a glimpse of) because something had to happen in order to produce the big egg that ended up appearing later on.  Then the female had to go 70 miles to gather food, while Dad served as the egg-warmer.  Since food was 70 miles away and conditions were not entirely favorable, both Dad and Mom were apparently too busy to tend to one another, even too busy to get together for a quickie.  There was one more instance later on, according to the movie, when there was time for a little more standing facing one another with necks bent.  Was there sex then, too?  If the offspring survived, after only about nine months the young bird witnessed the departure of its parents and likely would never see them again.  Mom and Dad likewise departed ways and came back after three months seeking other partners.  If we lapsed back into anthropomorphism, we might regard this as a kind of sanctioned infidelity, or maybe it is more like wife-swapping without ever swapping back.  Superficially, not thinking about it too very much, it is endearing to regard at least the mating part as a penguin love story, but I submit that window dressing is about the extent of it.  I think it is quite apparent that penguins do not very much exhibit patterns parallel to either human love or the social trappings that accompany the emotion.  I think it would be fair to assert, based upon watching the penguins in the movie, that the New Scholastic Dictionary for Penguins’ definition of the word “love” would read differently from that of the dictionary of human English language that I consulted.

Now, onward to further observations.  There are certain things the movie showed but did not address and others details that were conspicuously absent.  These things perplex and fascinate me.  I shall write something about several of them.

The movie did not tell whether Antarctica supports more than one flock of penguins.  Undoubtedly it does.  I have not researched this yet, but I would imagine that other “colonies” of penguins elsewhere would be different in ways that, for instance, robins are different from cardinals, except maybe not from the standpoint of color scheme.

There exists irony in the pattern of migration of this flock of penguins.  In a sense, going back to the place of your birth every year is similar to the practice that many other types of fowl exhibit.  However, in the case of these penguins in the movie, it is not the same as how the northern hemispheric birds “head south for the winter” to more favorable conditions.  It is quite a bit the opposite.  These penguins reside in the southern hemisphere, and yet they head south for the winter to some of the worst conditions imaginable on the surface of the earth.  This is thoroughly counterintuitive.  What a pattern to get locked into!  Humans would not do that, would they?  At least, humans would not ordinarily do so on an annual basis.

As with other birds, the penguins are both tough and delicate at the same time.  They have to be strong, determined, and healthy in order to withstand the conditions they must endure.  But they also are so tightly locked into their pattern of living that they are vulnerable to being brought down by a change in conditions.  In the case of the movie star penguins, their environmental requirements are so extreme and specific that you would expect any substantial changes in climate to be devastating.  This observation is especially poignant in light of the earth’s ongoing climate change that is presently happening.  Of course, adverse environmental conditions would negatively affect any type of plant or animal.  Even so, in the case of these penguins with their tight niche market, a distinct inflexibility is evident and is bound to be a liability when facing changes in the habitat.  And it might end up being a bit tougher to save the penguins than, say, the manatees.

If you look at the migrating bunch of penguins in the movie, they more or less fit into a pattern of a single-file march to their final destination.  This is only the big picture, however.  Examination of individual birds shows that some appear to get frisky and deviate out of line from time to time; some will flop on their bellies and navigate that way for a while; some will get lost and freeze to death; some will loiter and then catch up.  These birds individually have their own distinct personalities, just like housecats and dogs and all of us.  It is interesting that these birds have such a compulsion to conform and yet are individuals expressing their personal tendencies within the confines of this conformity.  My interpretation is that the big picture shows conformity in a statistical sort of way, while on the individual level there is a lot of latitude to take personal license---within limits, of course, beyond which the consequence is likely to be death.

The movie initially makes a strong case for protection of the offspring at all costs.  A mother is shown who does not coddle her newborn enough and loses it when it freezes solid.  She goes off to steal one from another mother.  A battle prevents this.  Both the assaulted mother and some nearby companions come to the rescue of the infant.   On the other hand, beyond that things become paradoxical.  The movie turns right around and contradicts its depiction of steadfast protectionism and does not address the inconsistency.  Let a big, hungry bird fly down and pick off a baby penguin for dinner.  Where is the battle in that case?  No, penguins are not humans.  Not one penguin---parent or otherwise---rushed to protect the group of babies under attack.  This is a glaring discrepancy.  Perhaps it is nature’s way of culling out the young penguin population of its more vulnerable members, so much so that there is a built-in selective blindness that the adults have, resulting in their not seeming to recognize treachery when it comes from outside the flock.

And for that matter, where did that big word-bombing bird fly in from, anyway?  Apparently, penguins are not the only animals that can live above ground in Antarctica and tolerate such climate extremes.  It seems to me that conditions are even worse for the big birds that can fly, if they are loners without others to huddle with, and if they create their own wind-chill by flying.  I wonder what else these big birds eat besides vulnerable young penguins.  Frozen penguin eggs, maybe?  If so, that would surely chill their insides further.  To me, it would be astounding for them to eat frozen eggs.  Personally, I would go for something warm-blooded and alive to eat every time I got hungry, if I were the big flying bird.

We should not practice anthropomorphism when it comes to the penguins’ devious behavior, either.  Once again, in the movie there was a penguin mother who tried to kidnap another mother’s baby.  Maybe there is a set of Ten Commandments for Penguins that covers such an infraction, but I doubt it.  Observation suggests that the rules are probably different in the case of penguins.  For instance, horrified humans would seek to prosecute kidnappers, but penguins probably consider it an ordinary occurrence (if they think about it at all) and only try to defend against it.  But it does appear that humans do not hold the patent on cheating and stealing.  Either that, or there is patent infringement going on.  Another fascinating thing is that kidnapping appears to be a relatively uncommon phenomenon among all those penguin mothers who lose their offspring.  This is another strong indication that individual penguins have unique personalities with surprising variability.

And where are all the bird droppings?  Admittedly, in the movie there seemed to be some little dark spots on the snow, but in all of those seemingly spontaneous sequences, not one of the birds got caught in the act of “doing it”.  Could the editors have been that good at culling out the frames that suggested bodily functions?  Or do the birds just store their waste up for the winter, too?

Come to think of it, if you were a penguin and if the usual daytime summer temperatures were 40 below zero Fahrenheit, and if you did not know any different, living would seem rather ordinary.  It just goes to show you that maybe life on Mars is not so implausible after all.

The penguin movie was thoroughly inspiring for at least one of us.  I hope a lot of other people enjoyed it as much as I did.

© 2005, srman07

The Nature of Existence

The Nature of Existence
12/ 4/05

I began formulating this essay in 1995---ten years ago. I wrote my first draft sometime in the last half of the 1990’s. My computer says 1999 was the year of the earliest draft that I retain digitally, but I have changed computers at least 2 times since 1995. My memory is that I began spawning my ideas on this subject in 1995 and set them in writing in the 1996 time frame. I have been quite concerned about “going public” on this subject (and for that matter on others), since I have no credentials to make me either publishable or immune from the disenfranchisement that would no doubt result if I could even get a magazine to print an essay such as this or some others that I probably will decide to release. But now blogging has made it possible for me to publish. This effectively allows me to record for posterity my ideas and conjectures whether anyone likes it or not. Blogs time and date entries, so as long as some event does not wipe out the server, there will always be independent evidence of what I wrote and when I wrote it. At least, I hope that it works that way. Furthermore, my thoughts are available for anyone to stumble across or not. If my writings do get noticed and it comes to anything, that is all right with me. If they do not get noticed, then at least my writings are on record. That, too, is good enough for me.

For years I have been trying to reason out how the “universe” as we perceive it came about. I have been watching as science has come up with additional information as to what happened billions of years ago that started the events that have led up to the existence of humans.

You probably are familiar with the sequence of the classic description: maybe 14 billion or so years ago, there was this tremendous explosion of presumably a huge collection of energy that had come together over an indeterminate period of time. A critical mass was attained after which things just couldn't stay together, and so it all blew apart. This would be imperfectly analogous to a super-super-super-super-nova or perhaps a huge black hole that could no longer be contained. Since then, the universe has supposedly been expanding. Measurements of this are confounded by having to take into account that the earth rotates around the sun and our solar system rotates around our galaxy and goodness knows what our galaxy rotates around. So far, however, the general consensus is that everything is expanding outwardly from a central point.

After the big bang, whatever existed at the time then interacted in various ways to form more complex structures---from the larger atoms all the way to planets, comets, and stars. When planets formed, at least one of them cooled down and had the position and proper mix of elements to allow life to start, because life is one possible configuration of matter. From amino acids and nucleic acids came simple life forms which, due to the need to adapt in order to use the environment in the most favorable ways, evolved over countless generations into more and more complex and elaborate life forms. Finally, higher intelligence became a part of the deal, and that included humans. Humans appear to have the privilege of being the most versatile of all intelligent life forms. This has led to 20th and then 21st century humans, with our airplanes and computers and tragic flaws.

In the late 20th century, I had aged enough to begin to consolidate my long-standing thoughts on big-picture subjects. In 1986, I also became the father of a drop-dead gorgeous baby girl.

My daughter had just turned ten years old when we were going to a park in my car that only just fit two people among the unfiled paperwork, miscellaneous un-dealt-with items, and bags of crushed aluminum cans (I collect them to help fund my favorite local environmental charity and because it is the right thing to do, anyway). The air conditioner was on, and my daughter was curious as to how we could have air conditioning in the first place. Good question. I had to answer it for her, of course. I talked with her about compressing gas until it would lose its heat via a radiator. And expanding the gas again would make it a lot cooler. A fan distributes air cooled by the expanded gas. We could stay cool in the summer that way. But my daughter also wanted to know where heat came from. And what is heat, anyway? Well, heat is energy. O.K., so cool is the absence of energy, right? Maybe? So what is energy? I could not really put the answer to that one into words, although I had an intuitive idea as to what energy is.

My daughter and I got back home from feeding the ducks, and she eventually went to bed. But I did not stop mulling over in my mind about energy. This eventually led me to think about the big bang and why all that mass of stuff would come together in the first place, especially if now everything seems to be traveling away from us. An expanding-contracting universe would mean that eventually everything would have to stop and start to go back together again, as if some sort of centralized gravitational force would finally overcome everything enough to make outward expansion stop and reverse. But that did not make sense to me, because if such a force did exist, its peak was right before the big bang, and the explosion should have diminished the gravitational force considerably to the point where it could not be restored enough ever to pull anything together again. Or maybe space is curved such that things travel away but eventually come around the bends to meet again. But then I had to think about the implications that if this were so, there would have to be an outer boundary to the universe. If that were true, then what would be outside this rim? Besides, an outer boundary does not imply infinity for that which resulted from our big bang, but it does imply there is something more beyond what is ours. More universes? Maybe so, but why would there be other collections of matter elsewhere? Why would there not be matter in between these universes? There would have to be centralized gravitational forces in all universes to cause them to be cohesive entities that expand and contract, but such a thing already conceptually did not make sense to me, as I have already explained. And then I had to go on and think about what preceded the matter that was there after the big bang.

I like to boil things down to their basics. So as my thought processes continued, I asked: if matter is here, is it true that it always has been here? If that is so, then the universe has existed always with a finite amount of matter that continues to change in its form over billions of years. But if that is so, then how do you explain how it came about? If it has always been in existence, that means it did not come from anything or anywhere. But that is inconsistent. After all, animals and plants are made of molecules, which come from atoms, which come from protons, neutrons, and electrons, which come from even smaller subatomic particles. These bits of matter may also have breakdown products, and so where did these even smaller pieces come from? What is the "bottom line" stuff? And how did it come about? To say that it has always been there is not enough, because that does not explain its origin based upon something more fundamental. So what is the ultimate fundamental thing whose origin does not have to be explained?

If you are deeply religious, you might tell me that basic matter came about because God made it happen. But if God did this, what was there before he did us the favor? Only God? Well, if that is so, how did God come about existing? Has he always been there? But to answer that question affirmatively is not enough for me--again--because it still does not explain to me the condition that exists to allow something in addition to just nothing to be out there, infinite or not. This question can be explained simply by saying that God is infinite and does not need a predecessor and is different from the physical universe and has to be accepted on faith. And this is fine for all of those that yearn for something more than just earthly existence: in all likelihood, the spiritual and the physical are like comparing apples to Cadillacs. Because the spiritual does not have to be physical, it does not have to obey the rules of the physical. The two can simply exist in parallel. On the other hand, since the spiritual arena is accepted by faith without proof in the scientific sense, it is more vulnerable to being relegated to the category of imagination. Certainly it is arguable that the physical universe operates just fine independent of spirituality.

So to continue with analysis within the realm of scientific inquiry, out of the above I went on to conclude that particulate matter is simply one of the manifestations of energy. Energy is a nebulous entity that implies the ability to do work. It appears that energy can differentiate into any number of possible forms, depending on the level of energy available and other factors which probably come about because of resonances, which I shall address elsewhere. Thus, I came to the conclusion that energy is the primary stuff of physical existence. If energy implies the capacity to do work, then energy would have to have been "charged up", at least at the beginning of its existence, relative to a lower state of energy. The ultimate state of low energy would be no energy at all. Therefore, if matter is a form of energy, then energy in the form of particles would possess the capacity to do work relative to ground zero, a reference point represented by no particles (and no energy) at all. Note that near absolute zero, matter still contains a huge amount of energy, which implies that absolute zero addresses only thermal energy and not everything that comprises particles so as to make them have substance.

I believe that scientists already have concluded that the basal state of energy of the universe is zero. This fits with what I am proposing here.

So, one night when I was at work late, and I was sitting at a table in a small room doing some writing at 2:00 in the morning, I started thinking about these things again. All of a sudden I had insight that finally made sense of it all.

The only thing that I could be comfortable with that could be infinite without my having to ask where it came from is: nothing!

That is correct---nothing. Zero energy, zero matter. Absolutely, totally empty space. Of course! That is the only "thing" that could go on and on forever without an implicit question attached to it as to where it came from. Emptiness---containing nothing, redundantly expressed---can truly go on and on infinitely without boundaries.

But then, if nothing is the universe's basal state, where did matter come from? Then it became apparent to me that “nothing” or “zero” has duplicity. I also will discuss this further in a different essay. Zero can be nothing, or it can be the sum of the pair of two numbers equal in magnitude, except one is positive and one is negative. Then zero could actually have the potential to revert from time to time to its summation components (and in the final analysis still remain zero). This implies that there might be a slight instability in the state of zero at any one point in time and at any one place, that can allow this separation to occur. How often this instability would amount to anything and whether it occurs in a lot of places would be difficult to tell and would probably have to be determined from a different vantage point and time frame, as I shall elaborate on farther down in this essay. Certainly it does not occur often from the standpoint of the time frame of a human life. Thus, maybe it is a property of "nothingness" to "separate itself" from time to time---rarely but with a definable statistical frequency---into two separate masses of energy of enormous potential that would be equal and opposite to one another, so that when put back together again, they would cancel one another out. I am basically referring to energy and anti-energy. The phenomenon of formation of these two separate masses of energy would, however, result in their explosive separation mostly in opposite directions, so that they would not have the chance to cancel one another out.

It followed directly, therefore, that it then made sense why and how the "big bang" came about. I would guess that the formation of two separate, huge masses of energy that fly away from one another rapidly would resemble an explosion. The energy thus released subsequently could differentiate out into all the possible forms of particles and waves, including molecules and life. It is just that the two separate masses of energy would be "anti" one another and if put together again would result in nothing again. In fact, eventually that would probably happen after many billions of years when enough dissipation had occurred. The energy in these separate masses would eventually meet up with their opposites (spawned from not the same but other big bangs) and disappear quietly into the original nothingness again. In an infinite macrocosm, what would keep this process from wildcatting out of control is an interesting speculation in itself. There must be an achievable balance between the frequency of occurrence and the rate of dissipation and neutralization that keeps everything in check. This also could imply that the mechanism of appearance depends on the rate of disappearance for its frequency. These two phenomena must be locked in resonance together.

The above may seem difficult to picture for those of us that are down here in the trenches with only the perspective of "worker ants". But say that you could live one hundred trillion years, and you also could travel far away and be able to see a large area of the vastness that is space, and suppose that you could speed things up so that each billion years was like only fifteen minutes or so from your perspective. In this scenario, looking into the vastness of space you would see over here the sudden violent formation of two separate masses of what would seem like light (assuming you could see its spectrum) that would then differentiate into defined entities such as galaxies, stars, and planets, and then in a while you would see about the same thing’s happening over there, etc. Over the course of a trillion years, from the perspective of your position, you might see ten or twelve of these separation phenomena. Each one would be in a unique state of development and eventual dispersion. And each one would have the ability to differentiate into all the different particles and waves that are possible any time that there is energy. That is to say, there is a forward bias that facilitates certain stable energy states, depending on the level of energy that is present at the time. This forward bias also favors entropy.

This hypothesis explains a great deal. The basal state of everything is nothing, and this nothing is infinite without having to be explained otherwise. The big bang came when equally opposite energy fields were formed and separated violently. Cyclical formation, expansion, and dissipation occurs. The sum of it all is zero.

I am unsure that this hypothesis is consistent with what physicists already have observed. They have produced something known as “anti-matter” in the laboratory. You would think that this means we already have a scientific basis for believing that a zero-sum universe can be possible. But from what I understand, the “anti-matter” that has been formed releases tremendous energy when it interacts with “matter” in experimental conditions. To me, this means that the physicists have found something that should have another name. The true result of the combination of energy and antienergy should involve no release of energy at all. Neutralization is an appropriate term for this process, whose resultant summation should be zero.

I am also very uncertain that this phenomenon of zero’s splitting into energy and anti-energy can be demonstrated in laboratory circumstances, for I suspect that a “critical mass” (to make a play on words) is necessary for its occurrence. Also, the probability that it will happen at any one place and at any one time is extremely small. It is likely to remain unknown what the nature of any hypothetical instability associated with the basal state of zero really is. Finally, we certainly should never be able to see the “anti-universe” associated with our big bang, for photons from our metaphorical mirror image would never reach us: they are outside of our “fishbowl”, they are traveling away from us, and even if they did come toward us, they should be neutralized by our own photons into oblivion.

I am not a physicist, and so I have to be content with sitting back for a long time to find out if the establishment comes up with a similar hypothesis and concludes that it is correct. In the meanwhile, as more scientific discoveries come about, it should be interesting and fun seeing how well they fit with what I have proposed above.

And as for the spiritual side: who knows? Maybe there are spirits and anti-spirits….

© 2005, srman07