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You don't need to read this. This is not the blog you are looking for. |
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Every now and then I have a "short" idea and put it here. I am an old man, and not just on the outside. Even my inner self has become bald, hunched, and wrinkled. So if you have even a smidgen of vitality flowing in your veins, you might find what I say to be insufferably archaic, old-fashioned, perhaps even antediluvian. I don't really expect anyone to read this blog. Except me, of course. But if you do happen to read it and like to argue, then please comment, because I will argue about almost anything. Entry with the most comments is "Invalid Entry" 
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| Again on the TV this morning I see talkers complaining the FBI "does not do enough" to prevent terrorism. That the Boston terrorists put out "warning signs". Why can't we have profiling and checking FaceBook posts and Google searches? The flaw in that line of thought is that none of it will pinpoint a terrorist. What it will give you is a list of people who are potential terrorists. And there is no guarantee that the next real terrorist will come from that list! What would you even do with the list? Let's imagine you profile 18 to 25 year old males of Muslim ethnicity who have Googled bomb-making techniques on the internet. You might end up with a list of 1000 people. Now what? Are you going to watch them 24 hours a day? There are 168 hours in a week so you would need at least 4 fulltime agents to watch each person on the list. That would be 4000 agents devoting all their time to simply watching people who might one day be a terrorist or maybe never will! The truth is that stopping a terrorist will always be a matter of luck and will often happen at the last minute, as in recent cases. Even the Boston bombings could have been avoided if someone had noticed that there were unattended bags on the sidewalk. |
| It's not a mystery to me how someone might become "radicalized" and desire to engage in destructive acts. Remember childhood games? The winners find them exhilarating. The losers have one of three attitudes: 1) Next time it might be me who wins. I will try harder. 2) This game is stupid. I will play a different game. 3) This game makes me angry. I will try to disrupt it. Of course, it is attitude #3 that leads to terrorism. In this case the "game" is the Game of Life, the Game of Careers and Marriages. If you fail at marriage and career, then you are a "loser". And if you are a loser, you will do one of three things: 1) Try to re-invent yourself as someone who can win. 2) Drop out and live an alternative lifestyle. 3) Become a terrorist. To me it is not a mystery how someone might become "radicalized" and desire to engage in destructive acts. |
| It's funny how we understand entire nations to be single individuals. America is a staunch defender of freedom. England is a good friend of America. Iran is a Muslim terrorist. North Korea is insane. I am sure there is a large group of intelligent, level-headed people living in North Korea. They just don't happen to be in power. |
| I often hear evil referred to as though it were an actual thing. Someone will say, "Oh, yes, I believe evil exists in the world." Just to set the record straight. Evil cannot exist in any concrete way. Evil is a judgement, not a thing. There is no evil in the world or anywhere else. What there actually is is our ability to judge things, events, whatever, as good or bad. Evil is a fancy way of saying bad. Good and bad don't literally exist. They are opinions. To judge something good can mean different things, but usually it means positive, favorable, desirable, approachable, usable, healthy, or some variation. Likewise, to judge something to be bad (or evil) usually means negative, unfavorable, undesirable, unapproachable, unusable, unhealthy, or some variation. If someone murders someone, then they have committed an undesirable, negative, unhealthy act. But nothing new has come into existence, nothing named evil has been unleashed. It's simply that we judge murder to be bad(evil). |
| I don't like the idea of quietly "passing away". It sounds peaceful, but I think I want to make a scene when I exit. A dramatic example would be I see a car wreck on the freeway and I rush to pull three kids from the burning wreckage before it explodes. I save the kids, but of course sustain serious injuries myself which kill me. There is a very good feature about me on the evening news and the three kids never forget my name and tell their own kids the story of how a stranger saved their lives. Suicide bomber? I just can't think of a good target. I don't hate anybody or any group. I wouldn't know who to bomb. I'll tell you the meaningful death I would love to have. It's Mission to Mars. I volunteer to be the first human to go to Mars. There is no way to bring me back, but that's OK. I'm old. I'm going to die anyway. Let me be the first person to die on Mars. But that will never happen. As an alternative to "passing away" I thought I might "mysteriously disappear." Just leave town and nobody ever sees me again. Are you really dead if no one sees the body? Eventually they would assume I must be dead. Although... before I disappear I could spread the rumor that I had discovered the secret of immortality. Then no one would ever be sure. Did he die? Or did he go live in another place where no one would know he was 200 years old? |
| I find myself awake, unable to sleep, and forced to find some activity to fill the time. I know! I will write! Normally I write stuff that I think at least has a slight chance of entertaining someone, but tonight I cannot afford to be so restrictive. Sorry, but I just need something to do. Putting words together in this case is an idle past time like playing solitaire. Sex. Haha! Word just popped into my mind. I don't write much erotica. I did a few pieces for contests once, but it was strange stuff. Even the contest masters didn't find it to be very erotic. Still won some prizes though. Space. As in science and science fiction. Apparently current thought is that empty space is not really empty. On a quantum level virtual particles pop into and out of existence. Space churns. Science seems dedicated to proving the proposition that nothing is what it seems to be. 1974. The first Star Wars movie. I was so excited. Even Time magazine knew it was going to be big. My father slept through it. Thirty years later when the second trilogy of movies came out, I understood how he felt. I don't think I've seen any of them all the way through at one sitting, but I've seen so many bits and pieces... I miss the feeling that something is exciting and important. Now nothing is. Old age sucks. |
| This one has been kicking around in my head for a long time. Some years ago protesters were burning American flags for some reason or other. A group of legislators decided they wanted to pass a law against burning the flag. But it can't be done. It's easy enough to define what "burning" is, but it's impossible to define what an American Flag is. Your first thought is, that's easy. It's a rectangle of cloth with 13 red and white horizontal stripes and in one corner is a blue rectangle containing 50 white stars. Yesssss, that's one version of the flag. But suppose it was printed on paper or posterboard? Then you could evade the law simply by burning paper flags. What if an artist painted a picture of a flag and burned the picture? OK, you say, it doesn't matter what the flag is made of, it's the image that is important. But what if the image is slightly wrong? What if it has 14 stripes instead of 13? What if there are 42 stars instead of 50? What if instead of red, white, and blue, it is burgundy, cream, and indigo? OK, you say, it doesn't have to be an exact image. The important point is that the intent of the image maker is to make an image of the American flag, even if it's not quite exact. So does that mean burning a photo of the flag is against the law? It would have to be, wouldn't it? What if instead of burning the photo, you burned the flag and took a picture of the flag burning, and then held that photo of a burning flag up at your protest? What about the news reporter taking a picture of a flag burning at a protest. Has he created an illegal image? What if you made a very tiny flag, smaller than a postage stamp, and burned that? Part of the problem is that "burn" is a verb that specifies a specific action, but "American flag" is a noun that does not specify any specific thing to be burned. There are versions of flags, many instances of the concept, but the concept itself is abstract and cannot be burned. It's like trying to outlaw the burning of long division. |
| Following up on an idea in the previous entry, that one might do something different just to be different, it points to a differentiation between two types of creativity. One type is "low" creativity which comes up with something new just because it wants something new. The other type is "high" creativity which comes up with something new in the service of a higher goal or purpose or theme. Most "great works" of art and literature are examples of High Creativity and much time is devoted by a small group of scholars to analyzing and studying their "theme" or "purpose". Meanwhile, the world is flooded with examples of Low Creativity which are entertaining, but not particularly meaningful. But even Low Creativity is better than the remainder, which is all the stuff that is produced with No Creativity! |
| My greatest fear is that I am a dumpy lump of clay. That I am ordinary. That there is nothing amazing about me. I am just an ordinary, boring, uninteresting example of humanity. I am afraid that when someone who believes that "each of us carries a spark of the divine" meets me, he will say, "Uh oh, no spark there." This fear motivates me to do things that are "different" just for the sake of being different. Just so I will not be ordinary. Yet at the same time that I try to escape it, I also enjoy my ordinariness and revel in it. I am glad that I like the same foods as everyone else, that I experience the same emotions, that I can watch TV shows without feeling alienated. If my life had gone a different way, I might have been a detective or a scientist or a news anchor. Whatever. I like being average height with average looks and average political views. No tall, skinny, bomb-throwing radical here. But even while I relax in my recliner watching mindless entertainment, there is still a part of my mind that says, no, do not be ordinary, get up and be creative. Go post something in your blog. |
| I have begun many things in my life. And only finished a fraction of them. Of course, in the case of a blog, what would "finished" mean? Reaching the 725th entry? I can't imagine writing 725 entries. But why not? One question a writer has to answer is how many beans he is going to spill. At one end of the spectrum you have the writer who wants to sum up the entire meaning of the universe in a single word (God? Love? Mind?) and at the other end is the writer who wants to write down every single thought that crosses his mind. Most of us lie between those two extremes. I have no desire to write down EVERYTHING. Ideally, the only things I write will be things I could read again with pleasure and pride. |
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