I am so tired of people of people defending porn. But I am even more tired of people who claim to be feminists, defending pornography and the sex industry as a whole. What is it about feminism that is so difficult to understand with regards to the sexual objectification of women?  It is the biggest no-brainer of all. Women will never have equal rights, equal pay or an equal voice as long as women are summarily dismissed by so many as objects for their own edification. Girls and women will never have the chance to be safe from sexual molestation by relatives, friends and strangers, until the sexual objectification of women ceases.

Okay. I understand that there will always be men who are incapable of understanding this premise, but I fail to see how women can fall for the ploy of male-acceptance-by-agreement, in this day and age.

Get over it! Men, learn a little self-control over your thoughts, your actions and your sexual desires. It isn’t impossible, because millions of men do it every day. Millions of women do, too.  And don’t expect applause for acting like a decent human being, either. Become one without applause.

Women, look around you and ask yourself if your daughters, your nieces and your granddaughters have the best world possible for women. If the answer is no, then ask yourself why. Once you answer the question, then begin to do something about it. Feminism isn’t  all about sexual liberation, although it is one piece of a very large puzzle. Feminism is about the right to be treated as human beings, without being sexualized, compartmentalized or discounted. It is about equal pay. It is about equal opportunity. It is about denouncing the myth of a gender hierarchy and valuing feminine traits, abilities, ideas and about validating and enforcing our legal rights.

I understand the need for for defining beliefs; the need for clarification; the need for being as clear as possible. What happens though it that it begins to eventually remind me of religious factions that have each decided to go their own way because they believe something just a little differently than the others believe. We have Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, Episcopal, Judaism, Islam, Pentecostal, Evangelical and Catholic. The problem with religion is that the whole house of cards is based on a false premise, so, it really doesn’t matter what one believes or doesn’t — they are wrong to begin with and the rest of it is only gargling after swallowing the bad fish whole.

I would prefer not to feel this way about political beliefs. Particularly because it is becoming increasingly apparent to me that many of these people with weird self-labels hold (some) similar beliefs as me. Important beliefs about how a society can be structured; about individual freedoms; about the role government should and should not play in the lives of citizens. Of course, I disagree with them on many points, too.  Many of them seem like some of the most thoughtful people I have come across in a long time. A majority of them are able to discuss things, rather than call each other names; are able to disagree without being intentionally offensive; are capable of having a dialogue, rather than simply spouting their favorite parrot-lines and hoping to sound smart. (I am soooo over people like that!)

The problem that I continue to encounter is that many of them change their labels with a startling frequency. I am uncertain if this merely because they come to understand a more narrowly defined clarification for their beliefs, or if it is because they jump from one thing to another over a year or two or five. Genuinely thoughtful people would tend to change as they come to understand more about something, but wouldn’t be susceptible to complete shifts with any amount of frequency.

Many of them enjoy quoting one author or “cult” like leader, or another. Rothbard seems at the base of libertarianism and it’s offshoots. Austrian economics seems another sound byte often tossed out to those related to market anarchism. People inducted into cults quote their gurus, and have their own parlance and get locked into a narrower and narrower path of belief. I see some similarities among the self-labelled polypolitical people. Most of them would likely be angry or offended if they thought they might be included among this group, but truly, highly intelligent people are caught up in things just like anyone else. Different centers of the brain are at play. Intelligence doesn’t come with automatice immunity to suckerism, unfortunately. I wish it did.

Tennessee has proposed a bill to allow only married couples to adopt children. It has failed once, I think. What is surprising is not that the bill has been proposed (this IS Tennessee, after all), but that it initially failed. It is still being pushed forward though and is getting it’s turn at being considered again. What do you expect? It’s Tennessee.

Now one theoretical physicist is proposing a radical new way to look at gravity. Erik Verlinde
of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, a prominent and
internationally respected string theorist, argues that gravitational
attraction could be the result of the way information about material
objects is organised in space. If true, it could provide the
fundamental explanation we have been seeking for decades.
link:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527443.800-the-entropy-force-a-new-direction-for-gravity.html

Wandering Cities That Roam The Steppes
link:
http://io9.com/5454406/wandering-cities-that-roam-the-steppes/gallery/#

Quote:
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” — John W. Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson (1912-2002)

Some of the COOLEST ARCHITECTURE IN THE WORLD:
link:
http://www.offbeatearth.com/33-of-the-worlds-strangest-buildings/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+OffbeatEarth+(Offbeat+Earth)&utm_content=Google+Reader

Real-Time 3D Modeling for Augmented Reality
These two videos below show how on the fly modeling of objects can help create a fully interactive world with occlusion, shadows and other 3D illusions needed to created reality out of pixels.
link:
http://thomaskcarpenter.com/2010/01/22/real-time-3d-modeling-for-augmented-reality/

Daredevil Space Diver To Leap Toward World’s First Supersonic Free-Fall From 120,000 Feet — he will take a balloon up, then jump, using a canopy of some sort to slow himself down before re-entry. He is wearing a space-suit type apparatus, by the way.
link:
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-01/120000-foot-jump-daredevil-space-diver-become-first-human-break-sound-barrier-free-fall

Mindfiles, Mindware and Mindclones Blog
One hundred questions answered about the coming age of our own cyberconsciousness and techno-immortality.
link:
http://mindclones.blogspot.com/

Quote:
If you can keep your head about you while all others are losing theirs, you’ll have the pick of the hats. ~~ Maximilien Robespierre

His arrogance didn’t end with the three topics I’ve mentioned, but these three were enough to almost put me off his philosophy. His philosophical theory was potent enough for me to continue, and, finally, I learned to separate the philosopher from the arrogant human. This lesson of separation has continued to serve me to this day, in all kinds of situations, be it personal relationships, political choices or business relationships.

I will never agree with Schopenhauer’s opinion of women and can only say that his strained and estranged relationship with his mother had likely contributed greatly to his inability to see women as his intellectual equal. His opinions regarding people of any color other than his own pale, dingy skin, were likely a product of the type of thinking of his day, the attitudes he was brought up with and the examples set for him by both the white and the blacks of that era. His opinion was wrong and bigoted, however, as with his opinion of women, I seriously doubt that he considered that it could be otherwise. Genuinely arrogant people usually do not question their naturally assumed superiority. That is the nature of arrogance.  This was one of  Schopenhauer’s deeply embedded personality flaws.

This leaves me with the question of the wealthy vs. the poor in regards to philosophical natural ability. This topic has been the subject of conversations with friends and it is interesting to note that all of us initially reject the idea, out of hand. Simply out of principal, perhaps. Or, because it seems utterly ridiculous that someone not born to struggle through life should have a better aptitude to wallow in the philosophical questions, than we, who not only struggle, but deal with worries and concerns caused by financial stress every day of our lives. It not only sounds ridiculous, but also, it feels ridiculous. Especially to those of us who are philosophically inclined, yet don’t belong to the upper financial class. It causes us to scoff, in defense of our own lives and, at least initially, to dismiss Schopenhauer out of hand because of his eager willingness to point out his superiority to us.

The more I thought on this, the more surprising it was to realize that there are very few worries and concerns that aren’t somehow financially related, if I go all the way to the base of the problem. A multitude of the problems, woes and stresses that each of us experience throughout the course of every day of our lives could be, believe it or not, corrected easily enough if we had money enough to afford the solution.

Whether it is a worry about our child becoming ill and needing specialty medical care, our house needing repairs, our car breaking down, our health giving way, our beloved passing on, or what we are going to do for the holidays – all can be solved, or greatly eased, with the appropriate amount of money.

When I consider this statement, things begin to look a little different to me. Did Schopenhauer have a hint of something I hadn’t been willing to consider? How much of my denial of his statement was tied up in the fact that I was not wealthy, and therefore, I resented, and resisted, his implication that I was not privy to the same capacity of thought as he was privy to, having been born to financial independence.

How much time, energy and thought goes into making sure I have the things in life that I need to live comfortably? How about for those things that I want beyond what I need? The few small luxuries we all indulge in for ourselves, at least once in a while. How much energy, time and thought is allocated to worry, concern and stress over how it all is working out, and what could go wrong and how to prevent what could go wrong and what if it doesn’t prevent it?  The sheer amount of energy and thought that is needed to sustain a human who is living in a semi-comfortable state, such as myself, is enormous.

And, I have great reason to believe, I am genuinely a unique case in that I deliberately eliminate a majority of additional stress factors in my life that most working class people live with every day, without question. I don’t live with my cell phone attached to my hip. I don’t text at all. If I want to talk to someone, I either call them or drop them an email. I take time to make sure I have enough sleep, get enough to eat and spend time doing those things that I truly enjoy like reading and knitting. But still, a majority of my energy is spent in everyday activities of working, preparing food, household chores, paying bills, repairing things, tending to my home, my car, my clothes, my computer, my things.

If I pause for a moment and consider what Schopenhauer had put forth, it was this:

That someone like himself, who was born with enough money behind him to not have to ever worry about food, clothing, shelter, old age, care during illness, having the right amount of reading material as well as access to anything else he needed, and access to most everything he may choose to want; to someone like him, all of the energy, time and thought expended by someone like me on assuring my continued comfortable existence, can be directed into his philosophical inquiries. That is a fairly amazing amount of energy, time and thought. It is at least 10 to 12 hours of my day, perhaps more if I include what I am thinking about in the background of my mind, even when I am indulging in philosophical thought.

What it comes down to is that my friction of existence is excessive. While his friction of existence is relatively minimal. My mind is always, whether I want it to or not, making sure all of the things I have mentioned are being accomplished, while Schopenhauer’s mind is fairly wide open for being dedicated to whatever topic he is chasing down at the moment. Surely, he has his own concerns and worries, but they are worries that I, too, carry, in addition to all those I have already noted. We both may feel concern over our love interests, it is likely we both have some small amount of anxiety about how we are viewed by our fellows, and we both have the same concerns about our health if we feel a pain. The similarities shared by he and I, though, would end somewhere near there. After that, it is mostly me with all of the existence clutter, and he without it.

In the end, I believe he has a valid point. Philosophy is not about the struggle of our work-a-day lives, but more about the struggle of being human. Thus, being a work-a-day person doesn’t give me more insight into what being human is about, instead it takes from me the greatest portion of my time, my energy and my thought, which could be spent delving into the questions that demand answers. Whether he had more natural philosophical ability becomes irrelevant, because he had what I do not have. The environment to allow it to flourish.

I am a little startled at how quickly my mind reacts to the foolishness of others. There are several kinds of people that can raise my cackles, and, no doubt, every person will readily recognize at least a few of these.

1) The person who speaks with great authority about something they know nothing about. And because they know nothing about it, they tend to carry on and on so they feel they sound knowledgeable. They only speak with great authority because they believe no one else (who is present) knows anything about the topic, either.  They desire to be seen as being brilliant or intelligent. There’s one currently in a group of my friends who has been called out twice, yet gives it another go at the first opportunity.  A long-winded know-nothing.

2) The parrot-er. Again, the person who speaks with great authority, and puts forth information as their own conclusion, when they are merely repeating a conclusion recently put out in print or online, which others have recently read or heard, too. The problem with this one is that they really do tend to carry on forever and ever and take a great deal of time. If I am in a group, large or small, that tends to be overly considerate of these types, I usually find a reason to leave early.

3) The bitcher/complainer/somebody-should-do-something talker. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been taken in by these people. It happened to me recently with a local group of people who really just want to get together to drink. Sometimes, I am a little slow at seeing the obvious. Over the years, I have become more adept at sniffing them out faster, but it still takes  a few meetings together, a few hours spent together, a few meals, a few email exchanges, a few rounds of offering solutions without any takers, before they actually begin to shine like what they really are….sideline junkies. Sympathy grabbers. Whiners. Attention whores. The gonna-do-er.

I tend to be drawn to other do-ers. And, the gonna-do-ers always appear like, sound like and act like like do-ers when I first encounter them. No matter how thoroughly I try to screen them out, some of them still slip under the radar for a while and waste my time and energy. It’s only after nothing ever happens; its only after nothing ever changes; it’s only after they are still complaining about the garage being dirty a year later; the ten commandments still hanging in the courthouse 6 months later; their husband cheating on them 3 years later; their mother treating them like shit 2 years later. It’s only after I have lent them my ear, my heart, my help, my mind, my ideas, my resources, my connections, my money (hopefully not much) and my sympathy that I can actually learn that they aren’t really interested in doing anything. They just enjoy complaining about it. Huge time thieves.

4) Customer service clerks who don’t know what company they are employed by, nor do they know anything about the products or services being offered by the company employing them. Somehow they have been given the title of customer service clerk.  However, if you ask a question, often by phone, but sometimes in person, they will begin to patiently explain it to you by reading from their computer screen. Usually what they are reading isn’t relevant to the question I originally asked, but that doesn’t matter. It isn’t they who don’t understand the question. It is always I who don’t understand the answer. The computer brought up this information to the 3 key words they typed in while I asked my question, so this is most definitely the answer for me.

I have tried to speak calmly. I have cajoled, sweet-talked, desperately begged and I have threatened. What I have learned is that nothing helps me. And, by the end of that hour-long merry-go-round conversation, when I have solved the riddle myself, and share my findings with them, they deny the answer, don’t apologize for providing the wrong answers and, when I am hanging up, they ask me if I’d like to purchase additional products or services from the same company. Of course I would…right after I have my lobotomy.

Here’s the deal though — if a bank offers a customer a loan, and the customer knows they can’t afford to pay back the loan, then the customer has every right, every obligation and every opportunity to say, “NO, THANK YOU”.  In the past, if a person took out a loan they couldn’t afford due to greed, changed circumstances, etc, then they either sold the house, filed bankruptcy or figured something out to make it work. Many people rented rooms out to others in order to make their mortgage payments. Many people took on second jobs at convenience stores and fast-food restaurants. If it became publicly known, the rest of us wondered why on earth they  took the loan out to begin with. “What were they thinking?”, we’d say to one another.

Not so today, though. Instead, the public thought has been quickly manipulated and told to believe now that it is the fault of the banks! and the government! Anything but the fault of the person who signed loan documents and agreed to pay back a loan they couldn’t afford.

In a capitalist society, that is how it works. You pay your way, you earn your way, you take your consequences for your actions, your reap your rewards for your successes and you learn how to live a life that is as comfortable as you can make it. 

So, how is it the bank’s fault for lending people money? People aren’t stupid. People know how much money they can afford to pay each month, each year, etc.  The only reason for SO MANY people taking out loans they can’t afford to pay back is that they were greedy. It’s the only plausible reason. And, it’s perfectly fine to be greedy in a capitalist society. Greed is actually anticipated and expected in a capitalist society. A capitalist society won’t operate properly without a lot of greed. However, the second part of the greedy equation is that if it doesn’t work out like you expected, you still have to hold up your end of the deal and take your lumps. In other words, the government, nor the taxpayers, aren’t expected to bail  you out if your gamble doesn’t pay off.

The banks were greedy also, but they are banks, they are money people, they are the ones rolling the dice with our money all the time — why are we so suprised to learn that they lent money to people who were willing to sign on the dotted line?

The government doesn’t need to regulate anything any more than they already do! Instead, people need to own up to their own choices. People need to accept responsibility for their choices, their actions and their gambles.

I don’t want anyone to suffer, but people who borrowed more than they could pay back have suffered for hundreds of years and the government didn’t step in to make it all alright for them. This situation is no different except that there are more people who are in this predicament at the same time. And, some of them can actually afford the loan they took out, however, the house they paid WAY TOO MUCH FOR is now worth much less than they paid, so they want to walk away from it. Buying real estate has always been a gamble. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Sell it, lose it or pay for it, but don’t expect the rest of us to pay for it.

I am fed up with it all. We bail the banks out, we bail the automakers out, we pay the interest on homeowners loans for them….

Socialism is not a dirty word. Our society has always made out that it is a terrible thing…mostly because of the cold war with Russia and “they are all socialists over there”.  The thing is, socialism is actually an excellent method of making sure that everyone works, everyone has enough food and clothing and whatever they need. It just doesn’t create the world of “haves” and “have nots” that capitalism does, so, the ”haves” prefer capitalism so that they can continue to have more, while others continue to have less.

If we are going to practice socialistic government, then we need to seriously consider moving towards a socialistic society. However, doing it piecemeal and selectively isn’t going to work. If we are going socialistic, then we need to really GO SOCIALISTIC. Attempting to mix various parts of socialism and capitalism together isn’t going to work. They are at odds with one another. That’s the reason that the Republicans took up the chant of “he wants to spread the wealth around” as part of their fearful Obama-slamming mantra. The “haves” will never willingly move toward socialism. If we see them agreeing with a plan that includes it, there will always be another agenda working beneath the surface of that plan. Because they don’t intend to become equal with the have-nots.

If the banks are too big to fail, then let them fail and let’s see what really happens. I doubt the reprecussions will be any longer lasting than the recession/depression we are currently experiencing. There isn’t any excuse for what any of the idiots have done. The banks who lent the money and sold the bundled loans, the people who borrowed more than they knew they could afford and the government who now thinks the rest of us should compensate all of them for thier short-sighted choices.  At least they had choices.

It’s a burden we all have to shoulder for now….and we have no choice in the matter, whatsoever.