American Dream

i was reading (reading you know is a form of work) a piece on Red State(a conservative website) about secular journalists getting Christianity and creationism all wrong. The piece found fault with the continual regurgitation of this one sentence.

If we establish Earth’s age at 4.5 billion years, then we contradict the biblical view that God created the world just 6,500 years ago.

Erik Erickson claims that no Christian he knows believes the earth is only 6,500 years old. The reason for this is that in the first days when God was creating the world there was no sun or moon so how could anyone know what length a day was. But he does go on to say that according to Gallup polls many Christians believe that modern man was created in the past 10,000 years.

According to the fossil record so far…Homo sapiens (that’s us) started spreading out from Africa 200,000 years ago and became fully modern approximately 50,000 years ago. These numbers could still be significantly wrong and may need to be pushed back further because relying on fossils to paint an historical picture is only valid when you can find fossils.

All sorts of climatic conditions and geologic strata are necessary for the preservation of bones. Unless sediments quickly hardened into stone the bones would have decomposed. Finding an area that has all the appropriate conditions for fossilization plus is in a vicinity that humans occupied is like finding a needle in a haystack.  Digging up the entire land and ocean bottoms is never going to happen so we have to make do with the little we find. In some parts of the world excavation has barely begun.  These new areas of exploration can contribute a wealth of information that may in future change prevailing views concerning mans age.

So in changing prevailing views you must be wondering where i’m going with all this. If a large percentage of Christians (according to Gallup polling) believe that man was created within the last 10,000 years then what other misleading information have human beings in general bought into?

Can you see a misleading mechanism in the term “American Dream?”  The two words alone are so well known all around the world that there is no need for me to define it. One mechanism that is used with these two words is the idea that everyone can be wealthy if they work hard enough. Just repeating the words “American Dream” will induce the reader to identify with the outcome or ideal even if it will never occur in their lifetime.

The significance of the fact that most hard workers will never be wealthy is lost in the pursuit of the dream. The dream of wealth holds more weight than the reality of a life spent working hard, paying bills and putting some away for a future retirement that hopefully will not be decimated by a medical bankruptcy.

Someone, probably not you will get there and even if it isn’t you, you will continue to support the idea that the “American Dream” is not a myth.

Depending on a folk tale to get you to the pot of gold maintains the status quo for those who have already achieved that status. All of us create the misleading reality by buying into the idea that hard work will make you wealthy. It might make you comfortable but it probably won’t make most of us wealthy. It will most definitely make you want more than you can afford by keeping you in debt for most of your life but the upside is that your wants will help to churn the economy.

Popular culture is limiting when it pigeonholes the ideals of wealth and hard work. There are a lot of wealthy people that don’t work hard in the physical sense of the word just as there are a lot of people that do work incredibly hard in the physical sense of the word and are not wealthy. So how do you rationalize these two types of people with the ideal of hard work and wealth?

Intellectual wrestlers will note the exaggerated example; ideological purists will argue the fine points. The ideological audience accepts the suffering and punishment of the hard workers that haven’t become wealthy. It is their fault for not having “made it” they must not have worked hard enough or saved enough because everyone can make it otherwise the ideal would be false and therefore a myth.

This myth that wealth and work go together is perpetuated by an elite that uses the media to keep those less comfortable from ever considering what the definition of work means. As long as you are in debt you can’t fight the myth. The truth is everyone will not be wealthy or even comfortable even though they have spent their whole lives working hard.

i started writing this piece yesterday so i thought it was appropriate to end it with a quote i saw this morning from a fellow who calls himself the

Ministry of Truth

“Corporate profits are at record highs, and so is poverty. There is a reason for that. Your poverty is their profit. Keeping you poor means keeping you dependent on the loan sharks. As you get poorer, they get richer. It isn't a coincidence. It is on purpose.

Republicans like to cry that the government is enslaving us, but the reality is that Wall Street and the Banks are enslaving us, the rich are enslaving us and starving us so they can charge us a fee to lend us money." Ministry of Truth

If you are in debt the things you think you own you don't. You are just renting them from the bank or the credit card company or the credit union until you have everything paid off. Only when it is all paid off do you truly own it.

Tropical Storm Irene

Flooding

Patterns occur in everyone's life, the predictable summer, fall, winter, spring, the twelve months, the holidays, the celestial milestones, full moons, solstices and eclipses births, deaths and tropical storms. St. Croix is so well situated that a pattern has developed over time that brings the eye of storms directly overhead, aren't we lucky!

Our language for all these patterns take into account the regularity by which they occur. Our insight is gained through annual experience that helps us communicate to newcomers the after effects of even a mild storm. In ancient times and maybe even for some today calamitous weather events were and are attributed to the wrath of God. This was done as a practical matter to explain away disruptive life altering changes. Any kind of divine reasoning behind why it all happens has really got holes in it. If there is a God i don't think he would regularly batter places like Haiti, making their lives that much more difficult. You might think God is doing you wrong but the odds are its the annual weather pattens and your ability to withstand its effects that are doing you wrong. Negative things happen to every human alive on this earth, no one is singling any of us out.

Run off at Cane Bay

Tropical Storm Irene  had been slowly building all day Sunday, dark skies, squalls, wind shifts and the ocean build up. She really started her visit around 2:00pm Sunday afternoon with heavy rain and winds; by 6:00pm we were all feeling the eye for about an hour and knew the worst was yet to come. Typically the back side of storms tend to be more damaging and i've never figured out exactly why that is. After the eye passed the winds picked up so we put up a few panels on the north side of the house and basically left the rest exposed. The power went out about 8:00pm and we were plunged into darkness. Not wanting to turn the generator on we lit the kerosene lamps, stayed up for another hour and went to bed for a fitful nights sleep.

Flooding

Irene was very kind to us...she decided to grow into a Level One Hurricane while passing us by and up here on the hill we probably only had gusts of about 75k. Which when you think about Hugo and its 200k was a blessing.

Tree damage was mild, we only lost some limbs off the Flamboyant  and Turpentine trees plus two of our banana trees were uprooted. The Avocado tree dropped small avocados that only filled half a bucket while most stayed on the tree. Otherwise the most annoying part of Irene is the lack of power.

Irene

We have been on the generator since Sunday. They say it may come on today but i've heard a transformer blew on our hill, i've also heard an electrical wire is rubbed off and that is what is delaying our section being turned on. Who knows, but i can tell you if we follow the regular pattern we will be the last to be turned on.

The phone works but the cell phone is still down. Rumor has it that AT&T lost 6 towers, if it is true it explains why i can't get any bars on my cell anywhere on the island.  i already have bad service so this doesn't bode well.

All in all Irene spared us her rath. i hope those further north are spared as well.

See ya next week.

Buffet and Trump

That time of year again, they almost have it all devoured

When you go to the conservative sites they claim that Warren Buffet must be a socialist because he thinks the rich should be taxed more. i love how the word socialist is used so much on the their sites. You’d think they’d all get sick of seeing it in every conceivable piece of political counter argument. If a piece these days doesn’t have “socialist” in it i think God they’ve lost the thread, they might loose their masses if they don’t repeat it over and over. In the conservative world that word is so fraught with terror, the commies are coming, the commies are coming its become an outright joke to the rest of us.

So today i’m wondering how they will respond to Donald Trump saying Monday that he is not averse to paying more taxes but that the oil companies won’t want to pay more because they aren’t patriotic. Is he a socialist now and if he isn’t how come? Trump claimed that he would be willing to pay more in taxes because he is patriotic but that other’s in his wealth strata aren’t and will leave the country before agreeing to up their ante.

Sargasso grass reminds me of the century plants curves

Here is a man that wanted to run for President on the Republican ticket. The Tea Partiers loved him but how are they going to reconcile his agreement with Buffet that the country needs the wealthy to pony up? Trump just stabbed the Tea Partiers, the Birthers, the Deathers, the Republican Party, Koch Bros., Rush Limbaugh and Fox News in the back, and gave President Obama a big leg-up politically. i wonder what all those millionaire congressmen and representatives will do now that one of their own has gone to the dark side. i’ll bet Trump wishes he had kept his mouth shut.

i read somewhere that some on the right think that the two of them (Buffet and Trump) should just donate their money to the government. The writer i read claimed that taxes are imposed thus making us slaves of the United States and not free human beings. i think he or she has no idea what they are talking about and probably spouts off about the Constitution without really understanding that taxes are an integral part of those documents. 

An early morning birding spot with moon bonus

Paying taxes are specifically laid out in the Constitution and are to be used to promote the general welfare of its citizens and the defense of the country. If he and anyone else on the right doesn’t support paying taxes then they are not patriots and that is where Trump really stuck his foot in it, Republicans don’t like paying taxes.

Liberals support paying taxes, they understand what the common good means, they understand what defense of this country means and that they both cost money. i’m curious to see if more wealthy come out of the woodwork to promote more taxes, wouldn’t that be a shift.

Next topic…corporate personhood. From the tenth century up until the early 1900’s corporations, churches and government were considered artificial persons. Natural persons were and still are you and i.

i love the places that have showers on the beach

If you are at all concerned about the ever enlarging power of corporations to control politicians, judges, natural assets, jobs and the law you might be interested in supporting Move To Amend, a group formed to amend the constitution. This group believes corporations are not persons and possess only the privileges citizens and their elected representatives willfully grant them. They do believe corporations can engage in a limited form of personhood which includes entering into contracts, suing and being sued etc. They don’t believe corporations should enjoy certain rights elucidated in the Constitution that were intended for natural human beings. Their Amendment will reverse the Supreme Court’s (Citizen United) recent invention of corporate personhood and limit corporations to their proper role: doing business. Go visit their site and learn more. http://movetoamend.org/learn-more

See ya next week

Ten inventions that improved our lives

It’s a tidbit day, lots of littjavascript:void(0)le interesting bits of trivia that you may not know about but have contributed to making this world a better place for all of us.

The Chocolate chip cookie…did you know that when Ruth Wakefield turned her toll house building into a restaurant she ran into difficulty while creating a common chocolate desert for the establishment? She had run out of baker’s chocolate but had Nestlé’s bars on hand in the candy counter. She grabbed a few of these, crumbled them up thinking they would melt and threw them into the dough. Ouila, chocolate chip cookies.

Paper bags…did you know that paper bags first resembled envelopes until Margaret Knight decided the bags should have a square bottom. She figured that with a square bottom more things could be carried in it.

Windshield wiper…how many of us take these simple devices for granted when we need to clean off our windshields? Well Mary Anderson while on vacation in New York took a tram during a storm. The tram driver had to stop frequently to go outside and clean off the snow that accumulated on his windshield. Mary thought this was a complete waste of time and invented the windshield wiper.

The Zipper…went through a few designers before Gideon Sundback increased the number of fasteners on the C-curity device his wife’s father’s company produced. He was distraught after her death and focused exclusively on improving the four per inch hook and eye to eleven per inch facing rows of teeth which later became known as the zipper when B.F. Goodrich decided to put it on their boots. It took twenty years before the fashion industry in the 1930’s used it in children’s clothing and today you can hardly find a piece of clothing that doesn’t have one.

Scissors…I’ll bet you thought these are a modern invention; I know I did but have come to find out that there are examples of scissors dating back to the First Century but becoming more popular in the Fifth. Cross bladed shears were used to cut hair in the barber shops of old. Researchers have found scissors in the shape of male and female figures carved into each blade of bronze apparently complementing each other during the act of cutting. Hmmmmm

Seat Belts…Volvo started use of the first seat belt in 1849 and by the early 1960’s they had introduced the shoulder strap which is standard in all cars sold today.

Candy…The first combinations that ancient man used to attend to his sweet tooth involved the use of honey. Farming bee hives until the advent of sugar in the middle ages was the only way to get that rush unless one ate fruit. During the middle ages only the rich could afford candy made from sugar so the masses had to make do with whatever they could find. It wasn’t until the Seventeenth Century that hard candy became popular and affordable.

Flashlight…Joshua Lionel Cowen invented the flashlight while trying to decorate his potted plants with light. He was the original owner of Eveready but wasn’t interested in the company. He passed it on, along with his design for a tube, light bulb and battery to Conrad Hubert who patented the idea and made millions. Lionel went on to invent toy trains while trying to come up with an idea to light up a display window.

A marshmallow…The root of the marshmallow plant was used in ancient Egypt to cure sore throats. It was mixed with honey originally but in a later Asian version it was mixed with egg whites and made into a lovely meringue. After many reincarnations through the ages our marshmallow’s no longer have any of the original plant included in the ingredients.

Umbrella…We have all seen pictures of native peoples holding large plant fronds over their heads to ward off rain but the idea for an actual umbrella came from wanting to ward off the sun not the rain. All cultures made shading devices but the Chinese were the first to lacquer their paper umbrellas to protect them from the rain. Later in the Eighteen hundreds Samuel Fox invented the steel ribbed umbrella and from there they invented the collapsible one most of us use.

And so these simple items have made huge differences in all our lives but we hardly think about them, today you did.

S&P Downgrade

President Obama will probably become the conservative’s scapegoat for the Standard and Poor’s downgrade. As a group, accepting blame for anything is an anathema, conservatives are never to blame, but this time this is their baby.

If President Obama hadn’t gone completely against his base and offered to put entitlements on the table he might be culpable and have to share part of this. But as it turns out the conservatives are the ones that rebuffed his offer to put Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on the table in exchange for closing some tax loopholes. When Cantor and Boehner walked out of meetings during the most recent debacle because of their refusal to even consider anything revenue based they took on complete ownership of the downgrade. President Obama tried to negotiate much to the chagrin of liberals, i don’t know what else he could have done.

We do have a debt problem, but it could be solved by raising revenues. Unfortunately Standard and Poor's came to the conclusion that our government will never again be allowed to raise revenues as long as the loonies on the right continue to block that avenue. Their adherence to the “no taxes” mantra for the wealthy has ruined our credit rating. They own it now, no one else. They do not care what happens to the country or to you.

Will they accept responsibility for the mess they have made of our country since 9/11, i doubt it? Although i don’t put much value on the S&P assessment, according to reports their initial accounting was off by 2 trillion and their evaluation of the mortgage backed securities as triple A credit worthy was a complete disaster, just the fact that it is out there gives the vulture’s carrion to eat.

i don’t usually post on the weekend but i want this out there. The ideology of the right has ruined our credit rating, chew on that and pass it on.

Music

John Lee Hooker: This song is so good go listen...
http://youtu.be/DtbtONej4ao

Music Makers!

Music is a binder, it draws people together and is a way of life for many. i'm a listener, a foot tapper, a windows rolled up in the car belter outer and a dancer when it moves me. i've always listened to music in the car and for some strange reason switched to talk radio trying to get a handle on local happenings. That was a huge mistake all it does is makes me depressed so i switched back to music and seat dance my way to where ever i'm going. i usually arrive feeling good which is definitely a good way to start out anything.

Night time in F'sted

John Coltrane
http://youtu.be/8j_TDoOPnIA 

Lately i've been listening to a variety of music. Jazz, blues, reggae, rock and roll, and some alternative stuff i find around the web. When you have Emilies threatening the region, constant power outages, no phones for over a month, dysfunction in DC and 8% across the board wage cuts in the islands i find music to be the great soother.  It makes me feel good no matter what else is going on and probably makes you feel good too.

Malathini & The Mahotella Queens
http://youtu.be/TEWYFkjH2jc

The Guardian newspaper site is an amazing place to pick up music you might have missed, mostly European bands that don't get much recognition here. Pandora is great for setting on your computer and piping into your home to fit whatever mood you are in. You can pick bands you like and their algorithm finds other bands you might also enjoy. i've been listening to them since they first started and although sometimes they can get the music really wrong for the most part they do a good job. Allmusic and Pitchfork do reviews and AOL lets you listen to bands on their site. My favorite Lulu was bought out by Apple and shut down. i still haven't found one i loved as much as that site. Apple really saw their competition as a threat and solved that one fast. i wish they hadn't done them in, but i still have hopes that someone else will come along and do it again.

Early evening at Sprat Hall

Gregory Issacs: Night Nurse 
http://youtu.be/K6oYyG0KcvQ     
Gilberto Gill:
http://youtu.be/wVEZzX214FQ 
Elite Gymnastics: So Close to Paradise
http://www.myspace.com/elitegymnastix
Barrington Levy: Black Roses
http://youtu.be/KG39b3GNCXg 
Portugal. The Man: Got it All
http://youtu.be/8JyZZIQC3v4
Toro y Moi : Still Sound
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gqh4e1S6j0
The nice thing about music today is you don't have to buy all the crappy songs on an album just to get the one you like. You can mix and match.

Emilies purple sunset

Music unites and all over the world people work together to raise awareness to teach and inspire others to express themselves through this medium. Music can help people sympathize with those they might not understand, musicians use it to protest everything and to speak of love, love lost and love found. We all can reach across religious, ideological and cultural divides by introducing others to our music, i've put a few links up...check them out, stop them if they irritate you and move on to a next one. But think about this if you can't reach someone through talk or writing, try music.

See ya next week.