One benefit I've gained from marriage, I think, is how to argue. As Phyllis Diller once said, "Never go to bed angry; stay up and fight."

I guess ideally, people would get along and wouldn't need to fight. But the kind of primate we are, the kind of cosmos we're in, we are made of mistakes. Mistakes in our genes, mistakes in our parenting, mistakes in our education, and let's not forget the central source of mistakes, mistakes in our own choices. Mistakes rule. It's the human condition.

At the same time, though, mistakes make our lives possible. Creativity is a mistake too. It never should have happened that way, but something went wrong and the usual correct way things are done broke down and something unexpected happened. Walla, here we are.

Anyway, perhaps the best we can hope for from humans is how to argue effectively. Effective arguing gets us somewhere better. That's the thing to keep in mind. Don't argue to destroy someone. If you want to destroy somebody, just kill him. But don't argue with him. If you're going to argue with somebody, do it with the intent of getting somewhere better than you are now.

Good advice to me, I think.

Here comes the muse fairy again. Where's a fly swatter when you need one?

Too late. My mind has the bug. And so now it's your turn to be infected, all three or four of you.

Woops. It's gone now. Senior moment.

Oh, now I remember. It's about the epiphany I had that I might be a stark raving mad lunatic suffering under the delusion of being sane. What triggered that was a story in the paper a day or two ago. Somebody had planted a bomb at an army recruitment station. No one was hurt, but some glass was shattered in front of Uncle Sam pointing his finger and saying he wants us. I got to thinking, the person who did that was probably a person of high minded ideals, like me. Unlike me, though, this person is a stark raving mad lunatic. Obviously, I'm not a stark raving mad lunatic like that person because ... I wasn't able to complete the sentence.

Once again, we have driven off the women and are left talking to ourselves. I like talking to me, though. I like the sound of my voice. What a wise voice I have. It's reassuring to have such a wise presence nearby. Why, it's almost as if there were some kind of intelligent design behind all this.

Even with the f'd up mess that we humans have made of our one and only home here, now and then a completely crazy lunatic thought occurs to me. You might think I'm material for the looney bin here, but this world could be a paradise. A paradise, I tell you. Virtually all people could be healthy, well educated, have plenty of resources, and living within a sound healthy environment. People could be living well on the interest of a healthy environment. There's no need to spend the capital down to zero and then crash. No new hardware is required for this. It's all a matter of cultureware.

So near and yet so far. So near and yet so far.

Fighting comes with marriage. It's like the milk in your bowl of cereal. But I don't think we learn how to argue in general better- just learn better methods of arguing with that one significant other.

Seems a reply is almost not called for. Now and then we humans get to where nothing need be said.

Think of a machine that's made completely from non-exotic materials. It's made entirely of just regular stuff that's kicking around. The design of this machine is so harmonious with these mundane materials that it's not imposed upon the materials but rather arises out of the nature of the materials themselves so as to organize them into the design. To build another machine, you just click the start button, which takes awhile but we don't mind, and a sequence of events is harmoniously set in motion where materials out of their own nature willingly assemble into a new being.

Ok, that's pretty amazing, I'll grant you that. That's a pretty good case for some sort of "intelligent design".

If you're out to insist upon an intelligent design that is imposed upon materials by a cranky old feller who hates fags, or excuse me, the sins of the fags, I don't buy it. I am willing, however, to go along with a notion that there's some kind of intelligent design that is within the mundane materials themselves, that is within the very fabric of space-time itself.

One of the great paradoxes, life is made out of order and life is also made out of mistakes. The cosmos is one big mistake generator that is out to tear down the fabric of our being. Mistakes in our genes, mistakes in our parenting, mistakes in our education, mistakes from our fellows, and lest we forget the prime source of mistakes, mistakes in our own choices, seem hell bent on reducing us from the magical beings we started as to the mediocred losers we have become.

Then again, the mistakes made our lives possible in the first place. Lots of us were the direct result of mistakes, but even beyond that; the whole process of evolution rests upon mistakes. Cosmic radiation that causes mistakes in genes has made possible the wonderful creatures we are today.

Creativity is a mistake too. There was this mistake, see. It shouldn't have happened that way but the regular approved proven way of doing things broke down.

And walla. Here we are.

As I understand the Gnostic philosophy, it's that this whole cosmos was a big mistake. They see God as a kind of cosmic asshole for creating this giant lunatic assylum in the first place. There might be something to that.

At least Paul McCartney will be able to sing that Negro music with more conviction now. As in the I been mistreated low down dirty woman blues. He gets no sympathy from me, though. Me, I can't afford other than to just put up with my marriage and make the best of it. That's what I call the blues.

Can you believe that at one time I thought our generation would make a positive difference? Isn't that a hoot? Just now, I'm guessing that we post WWII baby boomers will go down as far and away the most well off generation in the history of the planet to date, and quite likely, the last generation to ever be that well off again for a long while. And that will largely be our own fault. We might be known as the first generation of Americans to fail in insuring that each generation of Americans will be better off than the preceeding one, and this won't at all be due to circumstances beyond our control. This will be due to our own choices, our own "values."

And who will have led the charge for charging it to the next generation with more enthusiasm than anyone else? Why, of course, it'll have been those lewd licentious self-indulgent all-about-me-first hippies. Right? Wrong. No, it will have been from our "values" people, our church goers, our sanctimonious Christians.

The war in Iraq has to be one of our most flagrant examples of this. This will be the first war in our history to be funded exclusively from deficit spending. That's right. In every other war we've waged, we've had to borrow, but this war will be the first one on our kind-of books - to the extent we still keep books anymore - to be fought entirely on the charge card. We're the first generation in American history for whom the notion that somebody else really should pay for our war seems perfectly reasonable to us. For we are the generation who are owed this and more. You future generations owe this to us, and that is why we have put this war on your charge charge. Meanwhile, we're enjoying tax cuts. For that is what we're owed by you.

For this generation of Americans the perfectly natural way that we address any problem is by a little more of the hair of the dog that has bitten us already, consumption. We will consume our way to prosperity.

Our response to being attacked by terrorists, get out there, America, and shop. Shop 'til it hurts. It's your patriotic duty.

Our economy is going into the tank because we've been doing nothing but consuming our capital, no problemo. Let's institute a stimulus package to get consumption going at a good clip again. It's time again for America to do its patriotic duty and get consuming again. And don't go telling me you can't afford it. What, you don't have a charge card? Well get one.

This generation of Americans has got to be the first one in our history where what passes as conservatism proposes living beyond our means as a permanent way of life. Our conservatives of today will actually tell us with a straight face that our economic fundamentals are in good shape; living on borrowed money makes perfect sense; spending down our capital on every front, monetarily, environmentally, and morally, is sustainable. Why? Because we're God's chosen ones I guess.

Course this is all our parents fault. They spoiled us rotten.

One tribute to free enterpise, it was a factor in Einstein's coming up with a new branch of physics, which then helped us build bigger bombs. No. It was a factor in Einstein's coming up with a new branch of physics though. That job he got in the patent office was just exactly the right thing that subjected his prepared mind to questions of simultanaity in time. For that was the subject of some of the patents he was examining, patents concerning the problem of getting clocks synchronized. That's a good example of how commerce, enterprise, public institutions, public education all catalyze one another and cross pollinate so as to enable this inventive primate we are to have succeeded so brilliantly.

Today's politics in the U.S., I think, has gotten slightly skewed in favor of commerce and has allowed the other supports to languish. The other supports are starting to get a bit rotten from lack of proper maintenance.

Oh he's all about an assault on commerce and free enterprise. No, I'm about restoring a balance by which it can continue to thrive. At our best, that is what we liberals are about. We're aren't about overthrowing free enterprise. If we have our way, we will save free enterprise.

It's time for yet another Buddhist take over. That's my concept, see. As I see it, Buddhist take overs occur quite regularly. You just never notice it is all. If you notice it, it wasn't a Buddhist take over. It was probably those danged Christians or something.

A popular notion here is that liberals are the cause of our problems of today. I think that assessment is accurate, except that it's only seeing one half of the problem. It’s not just liberals who are the problem but our tendencies toward tribalism in general.

People are hard wired for tribalism. I heard about a study that indicates that, whenever you encounter something that validates your attitudes, your nervous system is hard wired to give you a dose of yummy feel good endorphins. Whenever you encounter something that runs counter to your attitudes, you involuntarily dose yourself with a shot of adrenaline, which tends to make people testy and hard to get along with. So why has evolution sculpted us to be cantankerous raving lunatics in this way? I suspect these behaviors work to strengthen our tribal allegiances within our tribes on the one hand while on the other hand assisting us in getting ready to put the kybosh on the rival tribe, those miserable subhumans. Course the members of the other tribe aren’t really subhumans, but it serves our purposes to think of them as such. Tribalism is a set of behaviors by which the tribes regulate their population to within the carrying capacity of their environment, and tribalism tends to select for the toughest meanest sons of guns around.

Thing is, we’ve come up with a different strategy that has many advantages over our more ancient tribal heritage but also comes into conflict with the instincts of tribalism, civilization. Civilization wins hands down in terms of producing wealth, but quite often it’s a 90 pound weakling compared to the powerful instincts that drive tribalism.

Here is the basic problem: Our culture wants to civilize us; our instincts are still trying to tribalize us. Our instincts drive us to grab the maximum share of limited resources and spread our genes far and wide and to put the kybosh on others who are in competition with us for limited resources. Civilized society, however, requires us to restrain these urges, develop ethics, and become more tolerant of and more cooperative with our neighbors.

So there’s the basic tension we’re experiencing, tribalism vs. civilization.

Ideally, religion is a civilizing influence. The problem there is that the religion often gets hijacked into the service of tribal instincts, a wolf in sheep’s clothing so to speak. And those tribal instincts don’t need any help. They’re powerful enough as it is. It’s civilization that needs a helping hand just now. Civilization is in trouble. Not just from liberalism, but from tribalism.

I will attempt to reason with our ___________ (liberal / conservative) to the extent one can reason with a ___________ (liberal / conservative). A ___________ (liberal / conservative), of course, only deals with ideas and concepts for the purpose of arguing points. Once the concept has helped out the willy nilly argument of our ___________ (liberal / conservative), then our ___________ (liberal / conservative) is done with it and discards it and moves on to another equally shallow and transitory application of another concept. To our ___________ (liberal / conservative), you see, any and every idea, value, philosophical construct, or concept is useful only to the extent that it validates our ___________ (liberal / conservative)’s existing mind set. Our ___________ (liberal / conservative) is equipped with a sort of mental ratchet that can only clank away in one direction only, the direction that ___________ (liberal / conservative) is hell bent on going regardless of whatever is actually the case. And then, after our ___________ (liberal / conservative) has taken this direction to its utterly absurd morally bankrupt conclusion, then there is nothing for it but that our ___________ (liberal / conservative) looks around for someone else to blame for it. That is just so typical of our ___________ (liberal / conservative).

A general rule of thumb, I’ve found, is that you ought to keep your landscape to within dimensions your wife can manage. Otherwise, you run the risk of getting roped into yardwork above and beyond the requisite male ritual of cutting of the grass. Such was my fate as I was hefting stone pads onto a part of our landscape for which maintenance could be ignored no longer and neighbors were giving us tactfully put friendly suggestions with the basic message that our landscape was looking like hell. There were some rotten boards that had been installed long ago as a walk path to the garden hose tap. A thought came to mind as it does every so often that I ought to look beneath those old boards. Sometimes you just get these uncanny intuitive notions about things. Karl Yung spoke of synchronicity in describing these intuitive insights by which thoughts arise through some path yet to be characterized by modern physics and in which our conventional notions of space and time don’t apply. In just about every culture in every time throughout history people have experienced ways of knowing that transcend the ordinary rationality of the ordinary mundane experience accessible to our familiar senses. I don’t know exactly what it was, but something said, Charlie, you ought to look under those old boards.

So I did. And lo. Some slugs and BB bugs. Shoot. I guess that means I have to go in to work on Monday morning after all.

So that’s my news. I haven’t found any buried treasure yet.

The proximity fuse of WWII has had me wondering for awhile. I’d heard of it mentioned on various WWII accounts. It was used in the Pacific theater in an anti-aircraft gunnery against the Japanese Kamikaze aircraft and also in the European theater in the Battle of the Bulge in anti-personnel gunnery. In both cases it was murderously effective. War is a grim business. In the Pacific Theater it was one of the factors by which the U.S. just steadily advanced on Japan without ever really being slowed down, along with the development of radar in general and with the development of the Hell Cat. The Hell Cat was designed with one thing in mind and one thing only, a Zero killer. And it was a huge success.

Over the years I’ve heard about this proximity fuse and in my mind I pictured a WWII technology radar set. In those days, of course, you didn’t have solid state electronics. For anything in the radio frequency electronics, you had vacuum tubes. So I pictured a vacuum tube radio set being propelled out of an anti-aircraft gun and subjected to 20,000 Gs. Absurd of course. So, just recently, in thinking about this, I had concluded, naw, it wasn’t an onboard radar set. My guess is that they used radar to set a crude timer within the shell so that the shell would burst in the proximity of a target aircraft.

Nope. I was wrong in that conclusion. The proximity fuse used within anti-aircraft shells of 1943 onward really was a vacuum tube based crude form of radar. The History Channel mentioned it on one of their Modern Marvels episodes. The vacuum tubes weren’t made of glass but had metal bodies. The circuitry consisted of a pulsed RF transmitter that was interleaved with an RF receiver. When the receiver signal reached a certain threshold, it triggered the shell. The tube circuitry was assembled by hand and then potted in some kind of plastic of the day. My guess is the battery to operate the filaments of the vacuum tubes was activated by some kind of G detector, hopefully one calibrated to be activated by being shot out of a cannon but not activated by being dropped on the deck.

Anyway, the proximity fuse resulted in a six fold increase in anti-aircraft effectiveness, reducing the number of shells per enemy aircraft kill from about 2400 to about 400.

And just in the nick of time too. Otherwise, who knows? The Kamikaze strategy might have worked.

There’ve been cases in my life when I’ve experienced a profound sense of resonance with something I’ve encountered in popular culture, occasions where I’ve had a profound sense along the lines of “God has steered me toward this; here is something I’m ready to learn at this point in my spiritual path.” One such encounter – don’t laugh – was the TV series popular back in the 70s, “Kung Fu”, starring David Carradine. This was the only time I’ve ever been so moved by a TV show. Another was encountering Richard Alpert’s – aka Ram Dass’ “Be Here Now.” Another was encountering the book “A Separate Reality” by Carlos Castanada.

In retrospect I think these profound experiences were legitimate in that they resonated with a universal human desire for a higher state of being, a desire that has manifested itself in every human culture of every age. At the same time, though, I recognize that the Kung Fu series was complete romanticized fiction. Yes, the story line had some small degree of overlap with actual historical events. Yes, there were Shao Lin temples in China where Buddhist philosophy was studied and where Buddhist meditation was practiced and where a form of martial arts was developed, but probably quite different from the idealized form of human perfection that the TV series depicted. In the TV series the Shao Lin had developed an advanced culture that was just light years beyond anything we in the West have known. I mean we’re a bunch of ill mannered lower primates compared to the high state of spiritual development depicted within the Shao Lin temple of the Kung Fu series. The writers of the program superimposed that urge for a view of human perfection upon a foreign culture because it’s a bit easier to idealize and romanticize a distant foreign culture. The story could just as well have been set in a Christian monastery, but that wouldn’t have worked quite as well. It’s too familiar. I mean Christians? Enlightened? I’m sorry but I can’t suspend my disbelief there. I aint never seen me a single Christian you could remotely accuse of being in a highly enlightened state of being. An enlightened Buddhist monk of a distant land of a distant time seems more believable to me.

This idealized view as was depicted on the series “Kung Fu” was very appealing within my peers at one time. According to this way we wanted to see ourselves, people would behave optimally at all times. When we’re confronted with a situation where we have to kick butt, yes we kick butt and in an optimal fashion with a high degree of highly developed highly focused skill but not out of fear or hatred. There’d be a calm center within at all times. At all times we’d behave optimally by which those who encounter us and the world at large are better for the encounters. As we walk into the sunset, those we’ve just encountered would have better marriages and would be better more fulfilled happier being, having learned something profound from having encountered us. This ideal was very popular among us hippies. That’s what we aspired to be in the world, kind of like David Carradine going about in the world and kicking butt when that was required but then the redneck would have learned something valuable. Basically everything and everyone we encountered would be elevated from having come into contact with us. That was the basic hippy ideal while we weren’t otherwise preoccupied with sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

In all honesty, though, I now recognize that, if this highly enlightened state of being exists, I have to admit that there’s no inherent reason why Buddhist monks would have had a better shot at finding it than Christian monks. Within our Christian tradition, people have put just as much time and effort into that search as in any other culture. But having come out of a Christian tradition that had somewhat failed me, I simply was more ready to have contempt for the Christian tradition and to see the Buddhist tradition with a romanticized fictitious concept of it.

The profound experiences I had were legitimate resonances with this universal urge for a higher state of being, but the story lines were complete romanticized idealized fantasy. I accept that without difficulty.

I think where a lot of religion goes wrong is in making the leap from the profound experience of a legitimate deeply felt resonance with this urge for a more enlightened state of being to the often fictitious or embellished story line that inspired that resonance as being the literal “Word of God.” In the “Book of Mormon”, for example, you’re invited at the end of the book to pray about what you’ve just read and judge the truth of the book based on what sort of burning in the bosom you get from it. Well, the burning in the bosom can be real and profound, but the book is still complete fiction.

So then people get in this mode to where they increasingly get into the mental habit of filtering their thinking through this belief system of “The book is the True. The book is true. The book is true.” Increasingly, the mind is proscribed from going to where the book might be called into question. As if it were the book that is the sacred thing.

I think we’d do better to cherish and nurture that yearning for a higher state of being without that being tied to “the book”.

Kind of along the lines of what Jesus said. “Lay up your treasures not where moth doth corrupt.”

To show you how still Mormon I am, and I can never shake my Mormonism entirely, it still occurs to me that this thinking of mine is all Satan’s deceit. Oh yeah, that boogy man is hard wired into my nervous system. This could all be Satan’s deceit. Of course Satan would make it make sense, that would be the snare of his lure. He’d lure you in with flattery of oh you are so intelligent with this thinking that is really just a ploy to cause you to doubt the true religion those loving members of your family believe in, the wholesome true church we all belong to. This is the church my loving grandfather took me to. This is the religion of our tribe. We belong to this close knit tribe of the faithful, those privileged to bear witness to His truth.

Don’t think that stuff isn’t potent and compelling even to the fallen sinner.

So this whole way of looking at things that is 180 degrees out of sync from the way I was brought up within the bosom of the fundamentalist religion of my youth might be of the Devil.

On the other hand, maybe this whole science v. religion argument has been missing the darned point. Suppose, and bear with me just a moment, suppose, see the whole notion of Satan is itself an anachronism. It’s not so much is science a better god than God. Maybe that’s the wrong question. A better question, perhaps, is science a better devil than Satan?

Not to take anything away from God, but everybody naturally wants to focus on God. My beef isn’t with God here. No argument with God. No. This is about devils.

Consider Satan. What can you do about Satan but to fear him and hate him? Better get into your house and hide from Satan. Satan is there behind every bush, lurking within every stranger. Who knows where Satan lurks? Can you really trust anyone? Really?

Consider the scientific principle of entropy, an alternative to Satan as an explanation for why we get all this darned bad luck, stuff going kablooey, things having a tendency to follow Murphy’s law of, if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. Satan is one explanation. Satan just naturally likes to see us suffer because he’s this ultimate cosmic jerk. There’s no redeeming Satan. Science provides a different devil, one I think is more useful. Stuff goes wrong because who knows? Maybe there’s a shortage of dimensions maybe. That thought has occurred to me. Maybe there were supposed to be 18 dimensions in space but something went wrong and only 4 are available to us. Maybe that’s why there’s this natural inherent tendency for everything to get tangled up, not enough dimensions for stuff to fit into comfortably. That tendency we see in garden hoses and extension cords is our devil, entropy. That same tendency that causes garden hoses and everything else in life to tangle is one of the laws of thermodynamics and is characterized in the concept of entropy. Everything in nature has this natural innate tendency to convert gold into lead. Everything runs toward chaos. All plans ultimately go gaft agley. The three laws of thermodynamics: you can’t win; you can’t even break even; you can’t even opt out of the game; you’re in regardless. That’s the devil.

That devil, entropy, at first seems a real downer. You can’t win. You’re born to lose. Then again, as you come to accept that unpleasant reality, you find another side of that devil. That devil has a friendly side after all. With that devil, we can intervene. Walla medicine. Walla science in general. Science will assist you in, one, understanding how it goes wrong, two, in predicting its nature, and, three, keeping it at bay. No, you can’t defeat the devil. I’m sorry but that’s the laws of thermodynamics. You can keep the devil at bay with science. But don’t lean too heavily upon that devil either. One thing I’ve observed, with just about everything, don’t expect it to change anything, don’t expect it to last, don’t lean too heavily upon. But, if you can accept those parameters of it, knock yourself out.

Another virtue of that devil, entropy, it doesn’t have a human face. Satan, see, has the caricature of a human face. Those people there. See the face of Satan upon them. Therefore God hath anointed us to put the holy kybosh upon them. Do you see that kind of thinking in the world today perchance? Do you see that sort of thinking in this world today?

Not that entropy provides you any sort of Heaven, but at least comprehending that devil doesn’t provide a convenient excuse for putting the Kybosh on the incarnation of Satan, your fellow passenger on this small lifeboat you’re on.

You’re on this lifeboat, see. Do you really want a world view that encourages you to see your fellow passenger as the incarnation of Satan? Is that a good idea really?

Thus am I out on the street on my soap box and preaching unto you, my brethren and sistren, the good news of a superior devil than Satan. What holy scripture? You ask. Well, in it’s in a constant state of flux, so please don’t fixate on any one book but I recommend Grant Petty’s “An Introductory Course on Atmospheric Radiation.” But don’t get so hung up on any one book. Books, yes, by all means books, books, and books. My advice, keep it kind of loosey gooey. Keep it free. Keep your game fluid. Don’t be too sure about stuff. Life is full of surprises.

God? Sorry, I don’t have any information on God whatsoever. You’re entirely on your own on that subject.

So what do you think of Ice Road Truckers the second season? I was surprised to see master screw up, Drew, back. I thought maybe he'd redeem himself this time around but he shows up having forgot his coat and his hard hat and then up and quits on the third day. I hate to see a guy screw up like that.

I quite like Alex, but geez what an uber Catholic. He was ragging on Rick for being in his mid twenties and not well into a crop of kids by now. "If he hadn't been using his private parts as a toy, he could be a grandfather by now."

My thesis that fundamentalist religion is really a biological strategy and loosely clothed in religion to give it legitimacy, exhibit A: Alex.

So what have we learned here?

I guess we've all said what's on our so called minds from every angle every which way at least 100 times.

One thing I've learned, or at least have a guess on, an answer to the question, man, what is your f'ing problem?

Aspberger's syndrome. Thomas Jefferson had it, you know.

So that's what I've got to show for my half century of being here, a possible guess as to what the f' is my f'ing problem.

For my second half, I guess I could focus on what to do about this situation. One approach I'm favoring is to take the approach that gays have taken with their f'ing problem, which ist to say, hey, it's not my f'ing problem. I'm just fine with myself. You're the one with the f'ing problem, man. F' off.

Thou shalt not kill.

Yes, that’s a mighty fine commandment. The best.

Thing is, writing up the commandment is the easy part. The hard part is writing up the exceptions and nuances. Oh, there are no exceptions and nuances? Well, isn’t that rather the definition of a fanatic? A fanatic is a person for whom there are no exceptions, no nuances, just the crisply black and white rule to be obeyed or you get an aircraft driven unto your office building window.

Another place where you see ultra crisp black and white, true or false, good or evil, 1 or 0, rules applied, a digital computer program, which is just fantastic for doing arithmetic, and arithmetic is very powerful, but it does have limitations. To illustrate that, as an exercise, you might try writing a computer program by which a robot can walk down an ordinary street without having precise prior knowledge of it. Turns out that’s close to impossible, or sure a lot harder than people thought when computers first immerged. I remember back in the 60s when computers were still mysterious room filled behemoths of lights winking and guys in white coats tending to them and tape decks whirling and how people were in awe of them because they could do complex math with utter precision. With them, you could land spacecraft on other planets. Very impressive. That was rocket science. Rocket science is hard, for me, at least. For these new fangled computers, rocket science was a snap. Can you blame us for predicting that it’d be a short matter of time before we had computing machines on the order of Arthur C. Clark’s “HAL 9000” and which might logically wonder, hey, who needs the middle man?

The big surprise that followed is that the true genius of us biological thinking devices is in our mundane intelligence that we take for granted. Mundane intelligence turns out to be the hard stuff. Calculus is easy. It’s only hard for us because calculus is a relative new comer within our evolutionary heritage. In the hard stuff, though, coping with a noisy chaotic world, humans are fantastic geniuses at it. To this day, computers can’t touch our ability to do that. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that will continue to be the case for awhile.

In other words, its our capacity to deal with exceptions and nuances that make us human.

You might think of a commandment as a sort of a computer program. It doesn’t take a God to come up with a commandment. Even we nerdy types can do it. It does, however, take a human being to know how to live.

Yes! I am the king of the hill. I'm the winner. I have out-talked all comers.

Why can’t we all just get along?

Well. I have a theory on that. I think we can get along. We get along by not getting along. It’s through not getting along that we get along. Provided, and it’s a big provided, our not getting along is a productive not getting along that takes us to the goal of getting along.

One thing that might be helpful, that we start from the premise that all human beings without exception are dimwit jerks. Once we have that established, we can put aside arguing over who is the dimwit jerk here and instead get on to arguing substantive issues.

As we know, marriage is an excellent model for not getting along. People going into marriage would do well to be informed if they haven’t figured it out already that all human beings without exception are dimwit jerks. Then, this wouldn’t come as such a nasty surprise as the marriage progresses.

It might be helpful for the marriage ceremony itself to make this plain right up front. Do you take this dimwit jerk here to be your contractually bound ball and chain for the duration, fool?

The key to a successful marriage is arguing. As Phyllis Diller once put it, “Never go to bed angry; stay up and fight.” Provided it’s arguing toward a constructive end. If you want to destroy somebody, don’t bother arguing; just kill ‘em. But don’t do that, of course.

I watched that movie “Who’s afraid of Virginia Wolf?” awhile back and that thought came to mind. Geez, why don’t you two do everyone a huge favor by getting a set of dueling pistols and stepping off 20 paces?

Another helpful suggestion, don’t discount emotions but neither put them in the driver’s seat. It’s better to say something along the lines of “I am feeling very angry and put out with you just now” as opposed to “What a freaking dimwit jerk you’re being. Again.”

Not that I’m such an expert. I’m only repeating what I learned in my court ordered anger management class.

Don’t you just wonder whether maybe the U.S. today has come down with a severe case of the other kind of ED, Empire Disease? ED is the condition of great nations when their leadership becomes aristocracy bound. It’s not that leaders lack anything you can put your finger on; they’re not necessarily stupid or weak or lack character, but that “right stuff” by which competent leadership happens gets lost somewhere along the lines. The principal symptom of ED, leaders fixate on a few simplistic ideas, which in themselves aren’t necessarily bad ideas provided you have some sort of feedback mechanism by which you are self-correcting. In the height of ED, however, self-correction doesn’t happen. When a simplistic idea doesn’t work, the ED response is to do it harder.

One spectacularly flagrant example of the Empire Disease has to be the leadership of the great European Empires in WWI. They had a set of leaders who just could not let go of the 19th century, in which everybody knows without any possibility of doubt or question that the way you fight a war is by sending in wave after wave of men by which you overwhelm the enemy. You feel like screaming into the history books, “Did you ever hear of the machine gun?”

To that mind set, though, a new development such as the machine gun is appreciated in only one way, the way in which it facilitates the implementation of the existing philosophy, the existing mind set.

From a Google on “battles of WW1:”

“A major military engagement of World War I, the Battle of Verdun was a ten month long ordeal between the French and German armies. The battle was part of an unsuccessful German campaign to take the offensive on the western front. Both the French and German armies suffered incredibly with an estimated 540,000 French and 430,000 German casualties and no strategic advantages were gained for either side. The Battle of Verdun is considered to be one of the most brutal events of World War I, and the site itself is remembered as the ‘battlefield with the highest density of dead per square yard.’"

My God. What a bunch of pansies we are in the U.S. for crying over 50,000 lost in Vietnam. Why, your great European Empire of WWI could literally go through that many in an afternoon and be proud to have done it for God, Country, and King.

Seems like our modern Democrats and Republicans both have their own manifestations of ED. GW Bush has been just a poster child for ED, with his few simplistic ideas that he will cling to as the ship of state crashes again and again and again on this rock and on that reef. We have got so many holes in the ship of state today. We’re are taking in water far beyond the capacity of the bilge pumps. We are listing. This doesn’t phase Bush in the slightest, nor to be fair, do our Democrats take much note of it. Tax cuts for the uber rich. Keep putting climate change on hold for somebody else to deal with. Let’s save money by not regulating anything. Put the children in charge of the candy store. Let’s turn the government into a sort of fire department, where we rush in to put out fires after the fact. Again, the root ideas of conservatism aren’t necessarily inherently bad.; it’s just that even good ideas are only as useful as you have some kind of monitoring of events and course correction; and, when the plan goes kablooey, you have some kind of plan B, some kind of contact with the real world.

Old Chinese proverb I made up: Always have plan B.

Definition of an ED aristocrat: No plan B.

I liken it a bit to birds. Flight is very demanding and expensive. A bird pays a high price for flight. If you can make a living without it, there’s a strong impetus to just lose flight quite promptly, which many species of birds have done to some extent. Similarly, being in touch with reality is very demanding and expensive; and, if you can find a way to make a living without it, you’d likely give that up.

That’s kind of how I perceive Bush. I don’t think he’s stupid or character flawed but for this one aspect in that he’s found an easier way to make a living than through the painful rigors of being in touch with reality.

Reality is for the little people.

ED will, of course, right itself over time, but it can be a tough old row to hoe along the way. Just ask the Brits. Seems like you just have to go through three or four or five generations who are miserably intractably infected with ED before the ill effects of ED will begin to subside and the great nation reinvent itself around a new reality.

The British Empire essentially took all of the 20th century to get over their case of ED and adjust to a new reality. In that case the new reality was that the economic center of gravity was shifting from Great Britain over to North America. The good news is that Britain, with some difficulty in which they were solidly right smack dab in the poor house for awhile and at times within a hair’s breadth of destruction did manage to survive the ill effects of ED and reinvent itself to a post British Empire world of today in which they prosper. Maybe there’s hope for us too.

In his book “Common Wealth” Jeffery Sachs talks about how in the 21st century the center of economic gravity will be shifting from North America to Asia. This isn’t any kind of indictment of us and our ways; the reason Sachs cites for this is just demographic. Actually, this is a success story for the Brits and for us. The economic institutions that we have developed are transforming the world into a more prosperous place. His view is actually quite optimistic, provided, and it’s a big provided, we can reinvent our energy infrastructure and industry so as to be compatible with our life support system, and, and it’s a big and, stabilize world population to be nice if it were 8 billion but no more than 9.5 billion.

Sachs predicts that we here in the U.S. ourselves will become richer than we are today. It’s just that we won’t be the economic center of gravity anymore. I liken that to living in Utah today. We’re not at the economic center of gravity of the U.S., but we don’t tend to worry about that too much, provided we have general prosperity ourselves. Similarly, the U.S. can be a prosperous place without having to be the world economic center of gravity.

So, I’m ending on a positive note here. If, and it’s a very big if, we can survive the severe case of ED we’re having, and if we can successfully reinvent ourselves to the realities we face, we will quite likely be all right.

The parable of the man at the movies

Man walks into a movie theater and he can’t see the movie. Then he makes a tremendous discovery. By standing up instead of sitting down like everyone else, he can see the movie perfectly. So he writes a book, “The One Highly Effective Habit of People Who Get to See the Big Picture.” It’s a national best seller. He’s on Larry King Live. Standing up in movie theaters catches on. Things are great for awhile but then it gets to where so many people are standing up in movie theaters, almost nobody can see the movie anymore. Worse, brawls break out over who get the front row seats. It’s a national crisis. Politicians run on law and order platforms.

Then, another author comes out with a book, “Let’s Try Sitting Down.” Well, this book is ridiculed from every pulpit and conservative talk show host. “That has got to be the dumbest idea I have ever heard even for liberals,” says Shawn Hannity. Rush Limbaugh runs a comedic sketch on liberals “I wanna see your butt. And when I see your butt, I feel happy inside.”

“But wait,” says the author, “Yes, it’s true that, if no more than a handful of people ever sit down in a movie theater, it will be an empty futile gesture that doesn’t do anyone any good. But somebody has to be first. Once you have a few people sitting down in movie theaters, this has a powerful effect on others, we being the social animals we are. Others will start to sit down in movie theaters too. With any luck, sitting down will become the social norm, and then, everyone will benefit. One, people will be able to see the Big Picture far better than before. Two, we won’t be having these terrible brawls in movie theaters. And three, sitting down is actually more comfortable a way to watch a movie.”

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t going to be a plea for help here that would require people to feel guilty for having missed the blatant indications of my being about to go berserk. I’m not about to go postal. Why? Because I have effective coping strategies in place that have held back the forces of misery and despair ever since I was driven out of the garden of innocent youth. It’s just that my present place of employment has given me some insight into some of the pressures by which a marginal personality could be pushed over the edge of postality. I can begin to perceive how a marginal personality could withdraw further and further into a paranoid corner in response to seeing others get promoted, getting menial assignments, being provided with hand me down junker equipment that requires special work-arounds to coax into working, the having to kiss up to superiors, one’s ideas and suggestions being shot down or, more likely, ignored.

This danged company is too much like high school II sometimes. It’s the jocks in charge all over again. These jocks are the gods of the company, just as, no doubt, they were also the gods of their high schools where gorgeous nubile cheerleaders paid homage to their heroic deeds. Whereas, I was good at trigonometry. No cheerleaders for that feat. Now, the cheerleaders are in the marketing department, and the jock gods are in management. How would it be to be one of the jock gods? How would it be?

How I wish that I could be, oh how I wish that I could be Richard Corey.

A couple of years back a co-worker, who had five kids or so, left off work one day, drove off to a secluded place, and blew his brains out. I often wonder what sort of issues he was having. I didn’t know him well. I mean, please, if you’re going to do a thing like that, leave a detailed explanation for us that we may learn from your sorry example or at least provide some entertainment value that your life won’t be a complete loss. I mean at the very least, provide some entertainment value with your miserable life. Don’t leave us wondering what sort of monsters might be lurking in the darkness. My guess, his marginal personality withdraw further and further into a paranoid corner in response to seeing others get promoted, getting menial assignments, being provided with hand me down junker equipment that requires special work-arounds to coax into working, the constant humiliating requirement of kissing up to idiot superiors, his ideas and suggestions being shot down or, more likely, ignored.

Still, for all this, what I do is to keep smiling at everyone. I am danged glad to have this crappy job and I will suck up just as hard as I can to keep it.

Oh that’s no way to live, you say? That may be, but I bet it’s the basic reality for lots of people. Generally, I’ve found, whatever I experience is being experienced by billions of others. I am pretty much at the center of humanity’s bell curve in most every respect. It’s like average has some kind of powerful gravity to it. To go slightly off average is doable, but it requires exponentially more energy to go further off average. Destination: further.

That thing Teddy Roosevelt said about average people who never leave much of a mark in life, something about those cold-hearted souls who never know victory or defeat, I mean it’s a point well taken that we should try to excel at whatever we do, yes. Seems to me a tad mean of Teddy, though, to get folks feeling bad about being average. The vast majority of people have to be average. What is average? By definition, it’s what most folks are. It’s only through most people being ordinary that a few get to be extraordinary. More power to you, Teddy, for searching and finding that special something that propelled you off average. I’m not out to disrespect that or bitterly excuse myself from the power of your example. I will keep searching for that fuel. I will keep searching.

Meanwhile, my son, of course, provides ample motivation for me to hang on through the non-heroic struggle with mediocrity. The role of kids, I think, is that when you have a kid to support, you will endure being mediocre within your mediocre crappy job and the motivation is much easier when it’s for this miraculous other being, this child, this one more shuffle of the deck who, who knows, could be a full house. This is how our crappy society keeps going, by people having kids by which they have the motivation to continue working at their crappy jobs and by which the crappy jobs will in turn have more people to fill them. This is God’s crappy plan for us.

Having a kid seems like sort of mean thing to do to somebody, to force somebody into existence. I feel a bit guilty about having done it to my son. There he was perfectly happy being nonexistent for an eternity and now he’s forced to be alive. We didn’t ask his permission for this; we just cruelly and selfishly perpetrated this upon him.

Already, the karma is beginning to catch up with us on this. As my son approaches his tenth birthday, the sheen of his infant innocence is starting to fade a bit into the grim reality of what’s in store ahead. He’s slowly becoming aware of the cruelty of what has been done to him in the form of making him alive on this planet. Gradually, he is becoming aware of the perpetrators of this crime, his mommy and his daddy. His outrage is beginning to show. Now we’re in for it.

He’s beginning to find that school isn’t a momentary departure from the real world of where he has been living in innocent wild abandon, but rather the factory/school is now increasingly the reality and the other world is the fading dream. Ugh. I’m so sorry, my son. I’m so sorry.

Don’t think for one minute, however, son, that this excuses you from having to do your homework.

I keep telling him, son, learn to play this electric guitar I got for you. It will be, yes, just more drudgery at first to learn, but it will fuel your much needed flight to off average later on. It will return you to your garden of innocent wild ecstasy for brief nourishing departures from drudgery. Once again, the world of drudgery will be the distant fading dream for awhile and the real world will be the one of wild abandonment.

It’s how I have endured, my son. It’s how I have endured.

And, I tell you this, son. It will be a babe magnet like you wouldn’t believe. But the hormones haven’t started to kick in yet.

Another way in which I cope effectively with my crappy job, which I’m very grateful to have, now and then I’ll make believe that I am a free man. Just as if I were a free man, I’ll just get up from my work station and walk right out the door where the nesting Brewer’s blackbirds, possibly cowbirds, will take exception to my intrusion into their world. They have the spectacular delusion that it’s all about them. Don’t they know that it’s all about us? Don’t they know that?

You know, death isn't so bad after all. It's just a matter of letting go.

I’m partly proud of and partly ashamed of my being able to hold down a crappy job. I’m proud that I can hold down a man’s job. On the other hand I’m ashamed that I put up with so much crap to keep my crappy wage slave job. Our present culture isn’t very supportive of the virtue of holding down a crappy job. It’s not something Clint Eastwood would do. Or, who’s the hot young male icon of virility these days? I’m way out of touch. I have no doubt whatsoever, however, that whoever he is, he would not demean himself at a crappy wage slave job. Today’s model of male virility, whoever he is, wouldn’t last five minutes at my job before he’d solve the problems here with a hale of automatic weapons fire and an impressive gasoline assisted explosion.

You know who is supportive, though, is my Dad. This has come as a surprise to me. This is the guy who has been a major thorn in my side for most of my life. He was a thorn in my side when I liked the Beatles. He was a thorn in my to the long hair. He was a thorn in my to my opposition to the Vietnam war and the draft. He was a thorn in my side to my environmental concerns. He was quite frequently a thorn in my side for no other reason than to keep his thorns sharp.

But, for all that, my Dad has been wonderfully supportive and sympathetic to my holding down a man’s crappy wage slave job. I didn’t expect that. I fully expected him to be a thorn in my side for demeaning myself at a crappy wage slave job. He’d certainly have no problem being a thorn in my side about it, as I’m already my own thorn in my side about it, and if there’s one thing my Dad knows how to do it is to merge with my own internal thorn in my side and expand upon it and amplify it. But no. Surprisingly, one of the very few things my Dad admires in a person is a capacity to hold down a crappy wage slave job. For the first time in my life, my Dad respects me now.