Archives for category: man induced fragility

scalia1

It is very rarely that I agree in full with something that I happen to stumble upon over the Internet.

And it’s no wonder that Scalia was absolutely right on the subject.
He had lived for so long in the shadow of the Constitution that at some point it must have downed on him.
The constitution, just as any other legal document, is nothing more, and nothing less, than what we make of it.

After all it was us, citizens, who wrote it in the first place.
Then amended it as we saw fit.
And are now interpreting it. To fit our own purposes, of course.

We don’t seem to agree much, lately, about those very purposes?
So we came up with diverging interpretations of what’s written in the Constitution?

Then the problem is with us, not with the Constitution.

Using it as a weapon, or adjusting it to fit the short term goals of whomever happens to be in power momentarily, won’t solve anything. Actually it will only make things worse.

grandson of sweetie pie

Grandson of TV’s Miss Sweetie Pie gunned down in St. Louis. (AP)

“St. Louis police say they found Andre Montgomery dead at a home Monday night. A second man was taken to a hospital in critical condition with gunshot wounds.
Police say that after someone shot Montgomery, the second man ran upstairs to help him. A third man who was in the home saw the second man carrying a gun and shot that man because he feared for his safety.”

So.
A guy invites some people in his home.
Judging by the way in which they interact they don’t know, or at least don’t trust, each-other.

Somebody – not necessarily from among the invited guests, shots the host.
Somebody else – presumably alerted by the noise, draws a gun and hurries to assist the victim.
A third person, fearing “for his safety”, draws his gun and shots the good Samaritan, simply because he was carrying a weapon.

Is there anything to be learned from here?

OK, by somehow removing all privately owned firearms in America, personal safety, on average, would be somewhat improved. But since something like that would be very unlikely to happen let’s concentrate on something more plausible.

How about taking grater care about who enters your home?

And something else.
Ever since reading about this I cannot stop thinking about the similarity between cars and guns.

Both are tools and both are dangerous. Yet almost everybody has the right to buy one.

But no-one is entitled to use a car without a license while so many people advocate that everybody should be allowed to carry guns, everywhere.

37 000 people dead and 2.35 million people injured or disabled as a consequence of road accidents. Per year.

32 000 people dead by fire arms. Per same year. 60% of them being suicides while roughly 34% are classified as homicides.
On top of this another 67 000 people are injured, per year, by fire arms.

Some could say that there is not any significant difference between the two situations and, as a consequence, a carry permit would not change much.
Are you sure about that?

Currently most guns do not follow their owners when they leave their houses – for various reasons. This is why I’m afraid that if more and more people would chose to carry their weapons, things would become a lot more complicated.

Not because people are bad or ill intended.

Simply because most ‘civilians’ are not trained to asses dangerous situations in an effective manner nor the necessary skills to use their weapons safely.

You see, defending your home – everybody else but you and your family becomes an enemy in this scenario, is very different from trying to help in a complex setting. When people might freak out at the sight of yet another gun.

That’s why not all those who own a gun should ‘drive’ them around without a license.

After all, how safe would you feel when driving in a country where no driver’s license is necessary and where DUI is not forbidden?

1x59cvjb_mojtouxmkbihsq

“When we’re trying to recreate an intellectual milieu, even one that’s relatively recent, we invariably discover that the vast majority of the sources we need to do such a thing have been swallowed up by oblivion and lost forever. Sometimes those that remain—e.g., Plato’s dialogues—remain because they were the best of the best, works of great importance. But this isn’t always (or even usually) the case. Sources often survive for largely accidental reasons. Regardless, the temptation to exaggerate the significance of what we have has proven irresistible for generations of intellectual historians. As the philosopher Aaron Haspel puts it in Everything (2015): “The parable of the drunk looking for his keys under the street lamp, where the light is better, explains vast swaths of intellectual history.” (John Faithful Hamer, Touch They’re Real in his blog Committing Sociology)

As always things are not as simple as they seem at the first glance – otherwise we wouldn’t have had a parable to start with, would we?

Basically the drunkard is doing the only reasonable thing available to him. Searching in the lightless park would be completely pointless but what if somebody else had lost a wallet in the lighted area?

Aaron Haspel is also right. Our intellectual history consists indeed of whatever cultural artifacts have been lucky enough to survive. Considered important enough by a sufficient number of people so they helped preserve it to the present day.
Or, evidently, both!

I’d like to direct your attention to ‘Considered important enough by a sufficient number of people’.
You see, the drunkard was looking under the street lamp because ‘This is where the light is’. He was reacting rather sensibly to a real situation.

But what if the reality of something is not so easily ascertainable? What if it’s a ‘second degree’ reality, one that is constantly (re)created by human intercourse? Like people choosing which book to keep and which one to throw into a bonfire?

fahrenheit451

Or even a ‘third degree’ reality? One that is imagined by someone who tries to assess the wishes of somebody else?

“Politicians are fooled into thinking corporate welfare is important to voters because politicians spend an inordinate amount of time with the powerful people to whom corporate welfare is vitally important. That’s why every candidate who has tried to win Iowa has prostrated him or herself before ethanol.”

You certainly guessed it. This paragraph will be about the ‘fourth degree’ reality. The one we, the voters, bring upon ourselves at the ballot box. After having carefully considered each candidate and his or her programme. Or having voted with ‘that particular one’ just because  …

The point I’m trying to make here being that this ‘fourth degree reality’ is not at all ‘virtual’, in the manner the second and the third ones are. In fact this ‘fourth degree’ reality is exactly the one where we have to live. Where we are faced with the consequences of the choices we, ourselves, have made while bringing it about.

I recently shared this meme on my FB wall:

when_i_was_poor_and_i_complained_about_inequality_they_said_i_was_bitter_2014-07-23

This is what happened next:
No two people are the same.“”That’s why I prefer equal opportunities instead of equality.
No two opportunities are the same. What you might consider an opportunity I might pass up. It’s a very diverse world we live in, a wide one in which hopefully everyone can be accommodated.

‘Can be’ or ‘will be’?

And who is the real looser here?

Let’s see what the broad picture looks like:

The world’s super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off at least $21 trillion, and possibly as much as $32tn, from their home countries and hide it abroad – a sum larger than the entire American economy.”

Meanwhile

education debt

And what’s wrong with that?!?
Everyone has the right to do what ever he wants with his money and why should anyone expect to be educated for free?!?

OK, let me put it differently.

Every society is like a big community, even if its members do not share an intimate knowledge of each-other.
At least theoretically an overwhelming majority of any nation share the same set of values and the same goal – the long term survival of both the population and the afore mentioned set of values.

Now please consider which society would be better at the game of survival:

One which would make it easier for as many of its members to develop as much of their individual potential as possible or one that would make it easier for a small number of its members to spirit away so much wealth that the rest would remain crippled?

One which would use the very concept of a ‘free market’ as broadly as possible – make sure that as many as possible of its members enjoy the widest possible autonomy – or one that would allow the ‘never as free as advertised’ market to degenerate into the ‘winner takes it all‘ situation we are bound to reach if we continue on our present course?

How could enough people afford to ‘wander around’ for long enough to find the opportunities that would fit them if they are saddled at birth with a huge burden – the ever burgeoning national debt?
Would enough people risk to take on any additional debt (in order to prepare themselves to make better use of the opportunities they might find) if too many of those opportunities, even if met diligently, do not pay enough to ‘eat’ AND pay back the debt?

How is a society going to survive, let alone thrive, if a lot of ‘opportunities’ (social needs) end up being ‘plugged’ by unfitting/under-skilled/’less than enthusiastic’ individuals? Or not at all?

On the ‘supply side’, what do you think of those who choose to dodge paying taxes?
On the ‘demand side’, what do you think of those who squander public money as if there is no tomorrow?

So what should we be talking about? Equality or Equal Breadth of Opportunity?
About the Bed of Procrustes or about a ‘Free Market’ where all participants are simultaneously autonomous and fully aware of their responsibility for their children’s future?

don't pee in our pool

First things first. Click on the picture and read the article.
It is interesting enough, even if it doesn’t say anything you didn’t already know – or at least presumed. That if enough people pee in the pool, the mixture of uric acid and chlorine, which produces some nasty chemicals, could become ‘powerful’ enough to affect a susceptible person.
The really interesting part being the fact that the scientists who have studied the matter do not seem to agree on how dangerous it is and what exactly, if anything, should be done about it.

But do we really need a scientist to tell us that we simply shouldn’t pee in the pool?
Regardless of whether the issuing chemicals would be powerful enough to harm us or not?

Then why do we hide behind slogans like ‘Global Warming is the New Religion’ when we discuss the subject of carbon dioxide being spewed into the atmosphere by the tens of billions of tonnes each year?

OK, I can understand that some of us are not convinced by the data put forward by the ‘alarmists’, specially after some of the scientists studying the matter have changed tack and have become ‘skeptical’ about the whole thing.
“I would say that the global warming is basically a non-problem. Just leave it alone and it will take care of itself. It is almost very hard for me to understand why almost every government in Europe — except for Polish government — is worried about global warming. It must be politics.”

“So far we have left the world in better shape than when we arrived, and this will continue with one exception — we have to stop wasting huge, I mean huge amounts of money on global warming. We have to do that or that may take us backwards. People think that is sustainable but it is not sustainable.” Ivar Giaever, 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics, speaking in July 2015.

So. Cutting down the tropical jungle to make room for palm trees grown for their oil and burning during the last two centuries fossil fuels that have been accumulated during God only knows how many millennia is ‘sustainable’! Yeah, right.

Do you remember the smog that used to hang over Los Angeles until some of us wised up to the matter?

Is it a matter of politics?!?
And money?!?
And what’s new about that? Or is it that some of those who have to gain from us continuing to burn fossil fuels, indiscriminately, have not understood, yet, that we are all together in this? That the atmosphere is nothing but the huge ‘pool’ where we all live?
And breathe…

To me it doesn’t really matter what ‘science’ has to say about this. In fact ‘science’ cannot speak, it’s the scientists who speak on its behalf.
Now, since they don’t seem to agree on this subject we’d better realize that ‘This is too important a matter to be left to the scientists’ and remember the Hippocratic principle which teaches us ‘primum non nocere’: ‘Above all, do no harm!’

If ‘it’s a matter of politics’ how about us telling the politicians how we wanted it solved instead of letting them scheme on it?
And then let the business people take care of the money part?

One other thing and I’ll wrap it up.
I can already see my libertarian friends frowning:
‘He had jumped on the big government bandwagon’.
Not so fast.
In fact this is not a decision that should be made by the government, be it big or small.

We are the ones who should make up our minds about this matter.
We are the ones who should close the faucets, use more efficient cars, collect the trash selectively, etc, etc, etc… and maybe even walk a little.
We are the ones who should instruct the governments we have elected to use some of our tax money to finance some honest research into renewable power sources instead of allowing them to transform the whole issue into another ‘pork barrel bonanza’…

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quote-a-nation-that-is-afraid-to-let-its-people-judge-the-truth-and-falsehood-in-an-open-market-is-a-john-f-kennedy-100676

There is undeniable truth in here but there is also a considerable amount of confusion.

Whenever truth is hidden behind the words instead of being openly discussed among those who deal information pertaining to a particular situation all those involved will eventually suffer the consequences of their deceptions.
This is something that has been common knowledge for sometime now yet there still are too many individuals who think they can ‘beat the market’ on this.

This is the true part.

What makes me wonder is how come a nation may become afraid of its own people? Isn’t this an oxymoron of sorts?
Or is it that only some members of that nation have become afraid that their deceptions will become apparent to the rest of the people?

I have used a small strike in an orchard valley as the symbol of man’s eternal, bitter warfare with himself.” (John Steinbeck, in a letter to George Albee)

Why on Earth had Kennedy chosen to beat around the bush instead of speaking out in plain English? It didn’t much good for him anyway, isn’t it?

Why are so many of us still following this policy?
Why are so many nations that allow this to happen?

ban muslims

A lot of pundits on both sides of the aisle are bending over backwards trying to explain how come Trump has captured so many ‘hearts and souls’.

Here’s a very poignant explanation from a seemingly independent minded, hence free, commentator who calls himself Tonkerdog1:

“The left will revulse at this and rightly so, but he is only appealing because the masses have had their culture irrevocably changed, by the policies and plans of that very left. They won’t take this anymore.

Frank Luntz, the Republican’s spin doctor, concurs:

“This is a different cat. This is a different phenomenon,” Luntz told reporters after conducting the focus group. “This is real. I’m having trouble processing it. Like, my legs are shaking,” he added.

“I want to put the Republican leadership behind this mirror and let them see. They need to wake up. They don’t realize how the grassroots have abandoned them. Donald Trump is punishment to a Republican elite that wasn’t listening to their grassroots.”

What we seem to have here is a classic case of people so fed up with what they perceive as happening around them that they fall for the first con man callous enough to grab the opportunity.

I’m not going to bore you with facts about how many times Trump changed his mind and things like that. You can read them by yourself. Just click here. I’m not even going to ask you why didn’t you saw this coming when he said that:

‘You have to take out their families’

What I am going to ask you is:

What if he’s actually sincere when he says that he doesn’t really care (for anything else but his own ego)?

And why should he?

““We need a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States while we figure out what the hell is going on,” he said, prompting a huge roar. The crowd of about 500 Trump faithful stood up as one and bellowed its approval.”

It seems that his ‘bellowing’ followers do not read much.
“Trump Wrongs the Right”?
So what?
The Internet is choke full with ‘the Media is full of shit’ messages. Why should people start believing what the media publishes now?

When are we going to understand that the Trumps of this world don’t come out of the blue?
Not a single one of them could have become what he is today without enough of us giving him a lot of credit.

Despite the fact that not a single one of them cares a iota about any of us.


globalnews.ca Storms flood roads, cause train derailment in Texas, which awaits remnants of Patricia

Some people maintain that we are in a middle of a ‘Global Warming’ and that, at least partially, we have brought this on our own heads.
Some others say that this is nothing but bullshit while a third group says that yes, it might be possible that the Earth is slowly heating up but that there is no way to demonstrate that ‘we did it’.

When it comes to what to do about it people are divided among totally different lines.
Some say we need to go on burning fossil fuel because it’s the most cost efficient way of producing energy, some-others that ‘we are sorry but we really need to close the economic gap there is between us and the developed nations’ and a few try to convince the rest that the Earth is the only home we’ve got and that we should do everything in our power to keep it as close to habitable as we can.

Where do I stand on this matter?
I’m not going to enter the dispute that tries to convince us that weather and climate are two different things.
I’m not going to pretend that ‘we did all of it’. Not even the most rabid treehuggers go that far.

All I’m going to do is ask this: Are you aware of the fact that burning things produces CO2 and that is a very effective green-house gas?
Do you know that “Currently, humans are emitting around 29 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per year.”? OK, some of it, about half according to some, is absorbed by the so called ‘carbon sinks’. But the rest? And how long before those sinks become saturated?
Furthermore, determining how much CO2 has been added to the atmosphere – or if any at all – is a rather murky business. Simply because of the seasonality of the plant life, volcanic eruptions and a lot of other variables.

That’s why I’m going to take another tack.
During billions of years in Earth’s history plants and animals have transformed atmospheric CO2 into coal, oil, natural gas and limestone. During this period, climate – and the Earth itself – have suffered huge transformations. Do we really think we can undo, even in part, this process – at a very rapid pace – without bearing at least some consequences?

Even some of those who, until very recently, kept saying that they need to close the development gap are having second thoughts and look for alternative methods.

www.chinatoday.com, A wedding ceremony held during heavy pollution in Beijing (20141021)