The Extra-Calvinisticum Makes Sense on Platonic Grounds

There was a difference of opinion between Lutherans and Calvinist reformers in Christology regarding The Son as the Logos, Word or Verb of God and Jesus the fully incarnate man. Kenotic theory ran of the opinion that The Son emptied himself entirely into the fleshly incarnate being of Jesus. Calvin believed there was a difference.

The difference is that The Son and Logos, Verb or Word did not entirely transfer himself into the fleshy incarnation of Jesus Christ. If he had then Jesus wouldn't have been able to experience the human experience fully as he did. The juxtaposition of nature in the eternal and heavenly with the worldly and temporal creates implicit difficulties in understanding.

With Plato's theory of forms it is easy to find a solution to the enigma. Jesus as man was like a Universal form making itself into a particular, with the difference being that the particular was the Universal in nature and being, yet limited in the capacities of the Universal as the particular. While the particular fleshy form of Jesus could live as  a man, suffer and be crucified, the fleshy form could not have the vision and perspective of the Universal form.
Jesus as the Word of God, as The Son, would keep the experience of being a man upon return to the Universal form. For Jesus though the Universal form is the being containing all possible sets or forms including Himself as a particular. Upon visiting the disciples after crucifixion and resurrection the Lord Jesus had an ambiguous form neither entirely fleshy nor entirely Universal. A mode of being neither physical and subject to the physical laws of cosmology nor in a form of heavenly non-temporal being that is a metaphysical question for humans.

The Son as the progenitor of all forms was of God, and was with God co-eternally. The Son is God yet a distinct personality-for-others. When the Son became the particular Jesus Christ the form of The Son ineluctably remained while the particular expressed its existence.

The President With the Greatest First Two Years

President Trump claimed to have the greatest first two years in office of any U.S. President. George Washington was the greatest U.S. President, although much what made him the best occurred before he took office. His unwillingness to let let the Presidential Office be more royal followed his leading the Revolutionary Army to victory. President Trump has yet to entirely secure the southern border, though he tries.

 President Trump has withstood more criticism and oppression by opponents than any former U.S.President except perhaps Abraham Lincoln. He has been a tough guy and has strengthened America against legions of those trying to weaken it. Thomas Jefferson however bought the Louisiana territory in 1803 after becoming President in 1801. That purchase made him debateably the greatest U.S. President in the first two years.

No one would mention Andrew Johnson’s purchase of Alaska yet that was not a small accomplishment either. President Trump is a business and sales guy and uses hyperbole and promotion to gain advantages politically for himself and the nation. His opponents call that lying, as if the godless, atheist, left had scruples about lying themselves.

One might consider President Reagan’s turnaround of the economy from the Carter malaise to one of vigor. If one doesn’t like Christians or Russia President Clinton’s first two years accomplished reforming the Cold War for the future in getting Yeltsin to give up Ukraine and Crimea, and burning Christians at Waco Texas, and might be their ticket. President Obama stimulated wars across North Africa and the Middle east after winning a Nobel Peace Prize and gave huge tax cuts to the rich as well as zero interest loans by the trillions to big banks so they could electronically mint trillions. Of course that pales in comparison to his later work in levering homosexual marriage on the nation through state legislatures and the Supreme Court with his judicial appointments; some might like that sort of thing.

President Eisenhower might have done the most in his first two years of anyone. The world was a three ring circus then with chaos and war ubiquitous, and modernity forced technological and scientific changes at home and abroad in economics and society. Eisenhower used the 101st Airborne to integrate schools in Little Rock Arkansas eventually. He was as much of a federalist law enforcer as Abraham Lincoln- who in his first two years had the tough luck of a challenging war and was compelled to fight against national disintegration.

President Kennedy accomplished a lot in three years before his assassination, The Apollo program might be his greatest legacy. He had failures like the Bay of Pigs too, yet I recall his challenge to all Americans to make a 50-mile hike. His expression ‘Ask not what you country can do for you but what you can do for your country’ was as inspirational as ‘when the tide comes in, all of the ships in the harbor rise.’ Kennedy was an inspirational leader.

President Trump has had a solid first two years in office. I would like someone good at ecological economics as President who is nonetheless nationalist, yet those don’t exist. The President is trying a long term rectification of China-U.S. trade that needed work to correct after the decade of U.S. business relocating there while the nation was flooded with illegal aliens etc. So the President is not exactly my idea of the best servant of the people one might find.

He did however appoint two moderately conservative judges and will continue that into a second term hopefully. If his claim to be the greatest ever in his first two years in office falls short of complete accuracy, it is at least consistent with his effort to promote everything American including himself.

Moderation in Human Space Development and Eco-Conservation

When billionaire Jeff Bezos declared the desire to expand human lifestyles into the solar system with a trillion people inhabiting every available niche and construction possible he expressed two human characteristics simultaneously. One was the honorable desire to advance technologically and explore. The second was careless, intemperate disregard of collateral damage to the ecosphere that supports life.

On Earth the ecosphere of the planet is under relentless, sustained attack and degradation from overuse. The concern of Wall Street is for profits with disregard for externalities such as the world outside profit margins. That is why moderation and temperance need return to business through regulation and reform of capitalism such that democracy could be rectified. And the citizens need look to the Democrat party for temperance and reason?

The Democrat Party today is godless and non-rational. Its leadership is incapable of coordinating and balancing its own policies. Its extremes run from Jeff Bezos the billionaire with wild extremist expansion to A.O.C.’s socialist Green New Deal to dole the people with social security and Medicare for everyone while jets are grounded and global warming remedies are forced on the nation while the rest of the world issues compensating carbon dioxide flatus in wonder.

The time frame for correcting the world’s ecosphere decline is presently ticking away. A U.N. report says a million species are threatened with extinction. Wall Street doesn’t understand the web of life and how one species supports another and actually creates a livable ecosphere. For the business people the birds and bees are nice childhood stories to inform youth on how to advance to sex, automobiles, rectilinear homes, shag carpets, social organizations and adulthood watching football. Correcting human ecospheric destruction affects that are inherent in the Human Economic Structure is beyond the ken (nel) of human social reality.

Human Economic Structure engineering is required to correct the most ancient models for human development of exploiting the environment to benefit humanity. Humanity was given the task by God of mastering the ecosphere and its wildlife rather than simple consuming it as bacteria. The H.E.S. need account for rebuilding the ecosphere and its wild denizens as well as using it for human convenience. It is as if humanity not only need enjoy the natural lawn, they need also mow, fertilize and water it.

The Earth presently has a human population of more than seven and a half billion people, and that number is sufficient to have put human survival- or at least ecospheric survival- on a negative growth trajectory. If one were to chart the ecospheric health on a graph, the ecospheric health would be inversely reflecting human population increase. That need be corrected. Human growth should stabilize yet even so the ecospheric decline need be reversed.

The Von Bezos plan for lunatic human expansion in the solar system is the traditional bacterial model of growth overcoming its growth medium. It is a reckless expansion model putting human existence into dangerous and unnecessary volatile and vulnerable condition on the edge of destruction. Moderation is what is required for human development; enlightened moderation with an advanced Human Economic System comprehensive of human economic impact on a given ecosphere.

Consuming the Earth to exhaustion before consuming the solar system to exhaustion is a bacterial business plan rather than human. Humans are about intellect differentiating them from beasts, not larger parts. A human bacterial model of exhausting Earth then exhausting the solar system before seeking new star systems to exhaust is daft and dangerous. Evolution works through natural selection. There are more losers than winners in natural selection. Formerly there were dozens of human like primates and now just one remains. The prospects of just one species representative surviving numerous environmental challenges are very poor. It is better to avoid brinksmanship with just one species rep existing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/10/jeff-bezoss-new-plans-space-have-stirred-up-old-fights-science-fiction/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.94889faa5c18

Human population in the solar system should never exceed 15 billion people more or less. Sticking 20 million on Mars, terraforming Venus, placing a billion in the outer solar system is probably enough. There is no urgent need to exhaust all of the resources of the solar system. Constructing human habitats in space might be convenient to place excess Earth population and a few billion more. And those people would need to visit Earth periodically- at least one year out of five, to maintain human physiological health in Earth-specific gravity and field conditions.

Humanity has grown within a particular gravitational field strength and shape-for gravity fields may perhaps alter in shape. Often people don’t realize how dependent human form is upon the particular gravitational field of the Earth. Without it the natural growth processes of a body are themselves akin to cancer. The relationships of the body’s parts to itself are formed with gravitational governance that when removed changes the entire structural logic- even the anus as the downward terminus of the digestive tract has no gravitational forms moving food waste downward. Excrement would be upwardly mobile-perhaps toward billionaire brains.

A future scenario for human development should have patience. Evolution is done in a day-or a year. A thousand years isn’t much for evolution’s pace. Human development and adaptation to the solar system should utilize several thousand years for reasonable continuity of human thought and sentience while intellectual and physical development continues.

Earth ecospheric systems probably should carry no more than one billion souls at a time with the remainder scattered about the solar system with no more than 15 billion living about it altogether. Women no longer wish to be baby factories once they are prosperous any way. Quality over quantity is important for human development and sustainability. Spiritual growth need occur though bacterial traits remain as in the Von Bezos paradigm.

In the book of Genesis God provided information concerning human origins. Simplistic readings were sufficient in previous generations. Today however with the rise of evolutionary biology and other sciences it is useful to understand the book with deeper insight. It is fundamentally incorporative of evolution directed by God within an unknown paradigm. Since God is omnipotent he has greater control of mass and energy than would a future quantum super-computer able to treat mass and energy as items as malleable as a holographic field created by the quantum super-computer.

Human future development needs to bring the Earth to ecospheric recovery while moderately developing human habitats around the solar system that one day would be able to support total solar system population of 15 billion with just one billion enjoying the Earth at any given time.

Shouldn't U.S.A. Increase Low-Income Housing in El Salvador

The United States apparently pays a lot for housing for illegal aliens in the United States. It might be a better investment to train El Salvadoran carpenters and to pour concrete dome homes and train builders for aluminum panel homes in El Salvador.

https://www.npr.org/2019/05/10/722173775/proposed-rule-could-evict-55-000-children-from-subsidized-housing H.U.D. proposes law to make it illegal allow illegal aliens in U.S. public housing

https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/SLV  U.S. foreign aid

The U.S. spent 118 million dollars in foreign aid to El Salvador in a recent year, and the Wall requires billions.Training El Salvadoran security personnel in the United States and sending them back to guard neighborhoods in El Salvador might be worthwhile, as might solar panel installation and water purification.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pentagon-approves-plan-to-shift-1-5b-for-wall-along-us-mexico-border

Plainly the U.S. government cannot reasonably break the law and pay for public housing for people that have criminally entered the United States. It can however build housing in nations that send hundreds of thousands of people here because of job, housing and security conditions in their home country.

It is necessary to remedy the problem of illegal entry with increased border security and improving the condition of the nations that send people north. They are two sides of the same coin of chaos and anomie.

Maybe N.A.S.A. Needs New Moon Lander Tech Systems

I saw an article stating that Congressional N.A.S.A. watchers say the space agency hasn't got a good moon landing plan and is 'scrambling'. It would be good to have the public lander system non-Bezos dependent. The billionaires have chemical rocket systems as if they were Werner Von Braun with a new thing. In fact N.A.S.A. has been lazy since the end of the Apollo missions as far as manned space goes.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/space/article/Congress-members-slam-NASA-for-lack-of-moon-13829547.php

I was lucky enough to get a reply letter from Senator John Glenn explaining that he wanted to fully fund the Space Station because there wasn't going to be a budget for other manned space stuff. I wanted N.A.S.A. to develop electromagnetic linear accelerators for off-Earth and off-moon shots. The technology looks very promising. Instead the navy is developing electromagnetic accelerator naval artillery- how useful to advance humanity!

Maybe there are other ways to get stuff on and off the Moon on the cheap. Creating an electromagnetic field mitt to catch landers dropped down from moon orbit. Sending a skyhook on a cable from the lunar surface to reel in orbital stuff. Some kind of combination electro-magnetic linear accelerator, electro-magnetic field and super-battery rechargeable system to throw moon to orbital modules up. Maybe lasers hitting reactive aft surfaces or particle beams from the moon hitting spacecraft ionized reactive surfaces?. There must be innumerable practical ways to combine various solar powered electronic lunar landing and exiting technologies that don't need chemical rocket tech that Robert Goddard and Von Braun invented or developed perhaps inspired by ancient Chinese.

Has N.A.S.A. lost its creative, inventive people to video games?

Where is Trump the Movie?

It is somewhat surprising to me that no one has written a screenplay for Trump the Movie. Trump the Movie should be a blockbuster; maybe the greatest box office in Hollywood history.

It would be a fiction movie inspired like a tragic-comedy version of Amadeus. Trump is a kind of Mozart of business-politics attacked by jealous Salieri-like Democrat party hacks interminably, for years. The Democrat party claims to be a Green New Deal- Jeff Bezos unlimited expansion to a trillion humans consuming the Solar System like locusts served by Amazon.galaxy. They hate the Mozart of political-economy figure for getting in their way.

Donald Trump perseveres against all odds domesticating squirrels that become guard dogs chirping to death any border violators seeking nuts and nougat. The President defends a good economy while false composers of falsehoods and fake news work with Aliens from someplace off-world to bust up the United States bad.

https://deadspin.com/the-vile-celtics-are-dead-and-im-so-happy-1834648874

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3k3kwb/jeff-bezos-is-a-post-earth-capitalist

President Trump could have a dream sequence where he is a Viking battling with just spoons and a git box, Huns, Mongols and pygmies attacking across the Potomac. Spoiler alert...the end hasn't been completed I would think, for the screenplay need be made into film during the Democrat national convention next year.

What is Wrong With the Democrat Party Today

Republicans ended the Cold War with Russia. Bill Clinton laid the foundation for restarting it. Wresting Ukraine and Crimea away from Russia with the leverage of U.S. military power was never a good idea, and one that doomed the peace. Republicans sought to do business with Russia while the Democrat party began to hate Russia for not being communist. The Democrat Party is a party of global socialism and communism. Their work is to weaken United States border security and succor any foreign socialist-communist and corporatist movement.

The Democrats are a loose party of hegemonistic idiots lacking good sense. The deep state element of Demo-Republican insiders continue the legacy of stupidity and lunatic expansionism-even off world, without moderation at all. It is a party of brinksmanship- politically and environmentally, without stability or right reason. They destroy conservation of human and ecospheric rights in pursuit of godless ideologies.

Biblical Scripture is Edifying

Scripture is edifying and enlightening. John Calvin wrote a paper on every book of the Bible except the Revelation and cited scripture in thousands of sermons. Sermons may be built around explaining what the biblos (little books) mean.

Romans 8-28 “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”

I found a free on-line course from the Univ of Geneva on John Calvin. He was a founder of the reformed movement who lived a little before the King James version was published. The course is in French with English subtitles and is very informative.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/calvin

Calvin is a good roll model for Christian for his focus on scripture. One of the books he wrote was on the Gospel according to John. It is a brilliant work and is free to download as a pdf file here…

https://archive.org/details/commentaryongosp01calvuoft/page/20

Calvin writes that God’s language in the Bible is accommodating to human beings and has a pedagogical character too. It is rather surprising in being illuminating as it is. The course instructors point out that Calvin wrote before modernism or its reaction-fundamentalism- existed. He wasn’t compelled to choose what sort of way to interpret the Bible as might moderns.

I hadn't heard of that before. It wasn't created by John Calvin. The idea of duty not being requisite- a deontological inference perhaps scripturally based- to be saved through belief on Christ- gets a bit convoluted and drifts away from dogmatics (Barthian). Calvin got involved in the persecution and execution by the town council of one Spanish heretic named Servetus- he was burned at the stake. So it could be that some people have formed a generalized movement about the concept of hyper-Calvinism as something like inquisition-level beliefs. Servetus if I recall, was somewhat like the Arians in denying the trinity aspect of God. The political problems of Geneva in separating from the Duke of Savoy's power as well as that of the Catholic Church (the Smalcaldian war following Luther for example-illustrates the volatility of the era and challenge for scholars and reformers in taking true yet neutral lines if possible instead of being politically charged. Giordano Bruno was a student at Calvin's Academy in Geneva- that is irony and should show scientists that use Bruno as an example of persecution by Christians that there is more than meets the eye to history.

Calvin died of natural causes in bed at age 55 in Geneva. The town council of Geneva burned to death a Spaniard named Servetus, who was a free scholar rather than a representative member of the Catholic Church of the day. The triune character of God (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit- three personalities of one true God- is/are Biblical. Numerous mentions of it can be found in the synoptic gospel. Constantine was Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire and famously converted to Christ before a battle. He made Christianity the official state religion of the Eastern Empire. In a sense he was the secular founder of the Orthodox Church. There were later theological scuffles about about the trinity in that era assuredly, yet valid exegesis and reasoning made the facts plain as it was in the time when Christ said to his disciples.

John 14:9-11 King James Version (KJV)

“9 Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Show us the Father?

10 Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works."

The Non-Sense Poem; 'Gall Four Naught'

Scrolls the drolls of differs swelths
clangs the bang of dingers shells
moonscape’s runeshapes gufflinks ‘nored
rise the hearties wit pinkles tells
ponc loik twangs of ever’d vessence
shingling sparlkles like tinker’s bells
swamprythin svarks oearn crocolyles mainge
gore four gorked theek bullet’s pained.

Foreign Trade Policy and Inflation

I am not an economist. Even so I will share some thoughts regarding inflation. Consider money supply. The 1% have a lot of money. More than 50 million Americans have less than one-half of one percent of the national income. The rich own the media, Wall Street and have appointees in the Federal Reserve, U.S. Treasury, Too Big to Fail Banks and the International Monetary Fund; they control money supply. Inflation can be generated whenever they deem it useful for political control or to influence political opinion. Their tight or easy money policies can increase or reduce inflation too (including domestic investment).

The Big Banks were loaned trillions at zero % interest after the 2008–9 derivatives and banking crash. For each dollar loaned to them and held they could loan out five electronic dollars created from nothing. In effect the big banks could electronically mint their own money by the trillions. The poor on the other hand, encounter prices with their 1/2 of 1% national income that fluctuate a little-really a very tiny fraction of the total national money supply, and the corporate owned media sensationalize that to spin it whatever way is required to gain the desired political control.

The political economy of uncreative citizens with a lot of money led by politicians that are uncreative too- and seek primarily to expand government to neo-socialism is ponderous. Without a physical commodity like gold to base the value of a dollar on, and the value of a dollar tied to physical capital infrastructure, production and good will, the role of foreign and domestic investment on the value of a dollar is substantial. It is worthwhile for those seeking to expand medicare for all to consider the problematic relation of the dollar to good will and expansion. Providing health service from the government directly to the nation’s poor through an expanded V.A. and Homeless care network would reduce its exposure to inflation by the trillions.

International investment and production policy matters tremendously concerning inflation. Consider the Tesla for example. Warren Buffet recently spoke critically of Tesla. Warren Buffet is invested in a Chinese electric car manufacturer; a rival. They will want to export Chinese electric cars to the United States (I believe one plans to do so next year). The cost of electric cars in the United States, and of Tesla in particular, will be impacted by the foreign trade and tariff policies of the United States and China. Elon Musk is incidentally building a very large Tesla factory in China- and I suppose the Chinese will want to own half, or 51% as they have required before a foreign corporation may establish in China.

Wal-mart claims to pay its employees 2x the national minimum wage of the United States while managers average $175,000 annually. One might buy canned corn sometimes for thirty cents.Poor Americans might buy some items cheaply and stretch their 1/2 of 1% far enough to live, while the prosperous and rich have more capital to buy into foreign nations and install profit making infrastructure. The rich get richer and the poor are more concerned about inflation in their little piece of the pie.

Plainly national and international policy including trade policies could be moderated in most circumstances for the rich to eat inflation rather than the poor. That’s just the way it is. Presently the poor are experiencing ecological inflationary policies too. The environment globally is paying for the rising cost by shrinkage. That is the environment pays the bill for unsustainable economic practice and can do so until it has had its ecobank reserves exhausted. Then the poor experience the ecological inflationary prices as toxic, crowded, over-heated, and paved.

What if the Global Economy Collapsed

There is not a single ecospherically sustainable economy on Earth so far as I know. Capitalism and communism too were built on expanding and exploiting limited natural resources. One million species presently are in danger of extinction because of human economic practices. I would guess that when the economy crash; really collapses such that it can’t be restarted, a couple of billion human lives will be lost.

I would be happier if there was at least one political party that understood what ecological economics is and tried to gradually transition the U.S. economy to that basis. One would want to keep free enterprise because of the creative leadership of individuals that simply doesn’t arise from bureaucracies or politicians. I have suggested that the House form some kind of permanent committee to study the problem of ecological economic transition nationally- it is much more than global warming remedies that are needed, yet so far no spark of interest has appeared with Democrats where it should.

In my opinion a mad scrambling for survival on a scale never before seen would happen if food supplies globally collapsed. A green new deal won’t transition the nation to ecological economics; it is focused on fixing just atmospheric heating from CO2 and is politically untenable.

With a possible limit to public debt- nearly a trillion annually goes to pay interest on the debt, there is a possibility of a catastrophic transition when investors flee abroad leaving the poor holding the bag on a defaulted economy. The Bubonic plagues of European history killed off 2/3rds of the population of that sub-continent. It is easy to imagine modern biological wars doing much worse after the global economic collapse.

To transition to an ecological economic foundation there would need to be regulations for favoring green synergy leading businesses. Environmental restoration would need public prioritization- perhaps people would need to have different zoning that would build hollow mountain ranges for people to live within while letting the wildlife recover outside. Electronic mass transit designed to go above and below ground. A limit on the amount of capital one could concentrate, a limit on the number of corporations one could invest in (3), a reduction of the term for patent exclusivity to three years with the inventor getting 10% royalties from any using the patent after it becomes public domain; there are innumerable changes required to make capitalism and free enterprise work to restore the world ecosphere so far as possible while advancing the quality of human life at the same time. That would not be easy, yet no party is really trying either.

It is necessary to defend freedom for humanity and individuals against the numerous totalitarian oppressors that will exploit economic or environmental collapse to try to force some kind of dictatorship over the masses-even a dictatorship of the proletariat would be onerous and offensive.

Unfortunately Democrats have taken the time of concern about the ecosphere to divide the people as much as they can. Some believe they would appreciate collapsing just the U.S. Government in order to impose the North American portion of global socialism under a planetary junta of communist-socialist leaders. Those people seem rather extreme.

Humans have Invented the Worst Weapons

I would think that the worst weapons ever created would be those that can destroy the Earth, or end its livability for human life. The present human economic structure would qualify in that regard, and second, maybe daft Democratic Party politicians. Third might be a device I read about in a newspaper a half century ago; the Cobalt Bomb. I have googled it to find a reference to it in the last decade and couldn’t find anything about it. It was said to be the size of a shoe-box and capable of destroying the atmosphere of Earth.

After that it would be using the hydrogen and oxygen of the world’s oceans as an explosive. Big bang with the right primer.

Gene recombinant weapons are very dangerous- a subtle change in the human structure could convert all human life into Democrats or worse if possible, as odd chimeras.

Lastly there would be smart-boulders hurled at the Earth from space- perhaps putting a small rocket or ion engine on an asteroid with an artificial intelligence guidance system directing its (or hundreds) course to impact the Earth at tens of thousands of miles per hour.

Deserving honorable mention are weaponized microwave devices to burn up life with a large water content (such as human) at a megacity scale, chemical weapons, nuclear bombs and television.

Democrats Were the Party of Slavery- Now It's Illegal Aliens

Southern Democrats owned about 4 million slaves when the civil war started. Republicans did not own slaves, the party was formed to combat slavery. That is, it formed in 1854 in opposition to expansion of slavery to western states.

Southern Democrats led the rebel way of succession so they could keep their slaves. Today they must settle for illegal aliens.

Southern Democrats - Wikipedia

After the war during reconstruction southern blacks were Republicans.

Human Business Model to Exterminate a Million Species

A U.N. study warned that one million species are threatened with extinction. That means fishing prospects aren't good in Alaska either.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/06/extinction-report-1-million-animals-plants-risk-uns-ipebs-says/1115842001/

Wrangell Alaska formerly was the location of the Alaska Pulp Corporation that cut a half billion feet of trees each year. It was a Japanese owned corporation that devastated Alaskan coastal forest old growth. Though it closed about 25 years ago, tourists are just now replacing the income a little with 60 cruise ships scheduled to make port calls this summer.

Humans in such vast numbers today- approaching 8 billion, wreak huge impact on the land and water as well as the atmosphere. It would be possible to have some fishing of quality for sports and subsistence fisherpersons for some time to come if the commercial catch was reduced at least to equal proportions with the other to sectors.

There actually is a fourth estate that wants a share of fish too- animals. Animals need fish to eat and to help keep the ecosphere alive. It is all cut of one cloth. It is just human economic structure virus killing off life instead of multiplying it. The Biblical admonition to be fruitful and multiply is applicable, quite likely, to the biosphere as well as just humans. Just humans in a godless shag carpet screwball empirical experience is more toward the yippee side of things than the responsible, sober and accountable.

Live Electron Rocket Launch, Hamas Rockets Target Civilians, Rockets for Peace and War

There is a video of a live rocket launch by Rocket Lab in about ten minutes...

Rockets are popular devices for lifting payloads. Rockets are useful for peace and war. State terrorism like the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel target civilians indiscriminately. That sort of K-Sam rocket isn't like a shoulder fired anti-tank rocket used by an individual soldier at close range upon enemy armor.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-48167234 Hamas rocket barrage on Israel

Ecosphere Decline Report From U.N. Due Tomorrow

A B.B.C. article summarized the grim yet well known findings that the world ecosphere is in serious decline due to Human Economic Structure virus (HES). Bad politics of Democrats and Republicans in the United States including invasive human species of non-citizens contribute to the destruction of wild ecospheric health. Some day that may become really serious, with deleterious consequences for Americans. As it is the destructive effect of 320 million Americans on the ecosphere is substantial.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48169783

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48104037

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/indonesia-sinks-foreign-boats-illegal-fishing-vietnam-malaysia-china-a8899836.html

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Apocalypse Orchestra

Born from the void and still pristine
Tranquil, vast and cold
See the orb of blue and green
When he spake the light shone gold

Brought to life, in the image of god
In this holy place
settled amoung the creatures odd

Eve, dear girl, avert thy gaze

Claims to love them all
his world below
Minding not their fall
a mirthful show

Merriments in the centerpiece
Weird things in galore
Is this the cradle of the disease
that man alone must answer for?

Joy and delight, forever ceased
Sufferings abloom
Eaten alive by the cauldron beast
Let the drones ring to the sound of doom

Songwriters: Mikael Lindstrom / Erik Larsson

Free Yale-Coursera Courses on-Line

Here is a link for twenty five courses at Yale through coursera that are free, on-line. Each requires perhaps 3 or 4 hours a week to complete. Some have interesting stuff for anyone.

Coursera courses at Yale- Free

Does a Human Fetus Have Less Rights than a Dog?

Does a human fetus have less right than a dog to exist? There are laws against cruelty to animals yet a human fetus in most states has not even the right to exist. What kind of morality is that?

Having recently completed a free Yale course offering on everyday morality put on by a professor of moral psychology I wondered about the omission of abortion as a topic. Apparently morality is thought to have some resemblance to positive laws where good laws that have been decided are no longer controversial; that is they are res judicata. That is convenient for the left that would force bad policy into law from on high.

Morality has a Kantian aspect to it consistent with democracy where the categorical imperative of doing onto others as others should do unto you-only support laws that work universally (for everyone). Universal laws are determined electively in a social context. 

Morality is a balance of personal intersocial power abstracted to a Universal level. Moral norms become those that support individual and group continuity or existence. Circles of morality are those where the elective power of morality is recognized. Unenfranchised creatures aren't electors and are morally exploitable.

Slaves, women and children in past times of history had little or no elective power and were socially exploitable. Then they became enfranchised and exploitation decreased. They became part of the general moral circle. Children were brought into more so than the past and were given limited rights; even pets and dogs were accorded some legal protections because they were liked by enfranchised humans. The glaring omission from the circle of morality prevalent in the U.S.A. was human fetuses that continued to be aborted by the millions annually.

Human fetus' have the problem of being incommunicado and unable to vote or participate in circles of morality. One must think that human fetuses have as much intelligence at least as a puppy at some point in their pre-birth existence. If one could poll a fetus on its opinion about existing or not, it would be unlikely to agree that it wanted to perish.

So at some point in the not too distant future technology may make it possible to test the mental capacity of fetuses and determine if they are as smart as puppies, and even if they can be made to communicate opinions, or learn anything while interacting with experimental researchers wired in some way to communicate. Then perhaps, fetuses may be given some right to exist within the human moral circle prevalent in the United States.

Reincarnation-Catch Alternative, Purgatory and Salvation

I wrote this reply to a post in a course I am taking...

 The ideas in your post are interesting and informative. The 'just world theory' does tend to be a post hoc rationalization especially useful to those that are well-off compared to those in more challenging circumstances.

I have often thought that the theory that 'this is the best of all possible worlds' is wrong. I personally could envision innumerable ways that it might be made better. That is, to clarify, from a secular point of view rather than a metaphysical one.

The 'catch alternative' theory was interesting. I am a Christian and don't believe in reincarnation. The theory of 'catch alternative' is comparable though to the Catholic idea of purgatory where souls must labor to improve their character before being deemed worthy to enter heaven. It is a salvation by works paradigm that was deemed unworthy by protestant theologians first and later by catholic theologians too.

Reincarnation is a good paradigm for working off sin and for finding some just way to pay for bad worldly deeds and benefit from good conduct/actions. Christians have a different idea about finding a just world (reincarnation is a kind of metaphysical justice for the world paradigm)- fundamentally they stipulate that everyone has original sin (thermodynamics make humans consume mass to make energy for living and reproducing and that leads to adverse social relations). The world has people who are naturally wrong and cannot save themselves- God alone can save them as so that is why he sent His Son Jesus Christ to intervene. Those that believe Jesus is God and accept His atoning sacrifice will be found acceptable to God in eternal life.

Sin is a human condition. Those that follow Jesus try to be without sin. God sees Jesus' perfect life without sin in those that accept the Lord as their redeemer. God is perfect and those that would be with God for eternity must be perfect too. Only Jesus Christ could accomplish that, and he conveys his sinless nature to those that have faith in His salvation work. God sees the character of Christ for the saved when they die and go to eternity.

The U.S.A. has many atheists. People that are entirely worldly tend to chase after promotion and wealth. They tend to kiss the derriers of the powerful and richest in order to prosper. Politicians tend toward being shallow, superficial and self-serving. Sometimes they can be hired to work for the good of the people materially at least, and that isn't necessarily bad.

The Lord said that the meek shall inherit the Earth and that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. They are things to think about.

Mind-Matter Duality Reconsidered

People have common misunderstandings about mind/matter duality. Mind is different than lifeless matter, unless one was to stipulate with Leibnitz that 1-dimensional monads form the core of subatomic material existence and they are made of spirit.

I wonder if people would argue against the ability of A.I. to generate questions or sub-routines for-itself and to make 'free-will' choices with its new constructs? Free will might be modeled  within an initially  deterministic A.I. paradigm. To controvert Prof Bloom's defense of reason and free will in his article, one might also want to controvert the capacity for A.I. to write its own code and act on its self-written new code. The biomechanics of the A.I. programming might be said to be in the initial program written by a human programmer.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/03/the-war-on-reason/357561/

Spirit as the foundation of matter-as if zero-dimensional points and one-dimensional strings of M-Theory, embedded in a meta-field phenomenal existence like decohered virtual particles were criterion problems, is challenging to appreciate. Humans regard mass and energy from the inside as it were; like fish made of water swimming in an ocean of water wondering reflectively if their thoughts are made of something besides water or if thought is a different substance than water. So one might arrive at the questions; can water think for itself without sentient being as fish-for-themselves? Can a knower know without existing (perhaps relying on the sentient ocean to think-for-others and for-oneself?

I believe one might distill the question of how and where sentience exists within or without the water-column and find the answer to be within structure. Structure gives rise to sentience. Form of mass and energy is qualitatively different that the components of elements. That is easy to see at the molecular level in relation to atoms and in the assembly of complex machines from kits with and without instruction pamphlets.

A Nobel prize winner; Robert Laughlin, wrote a good book on materials physics titled Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down https://www.amazon.com/Different-Universe-Reinventing-Physics-Bottom/dp/0465038298 the book relates some of the ideas about qualitative states of matter and form comprising significant differences.

I should point out here to the fallacy regarding God that His existence is contingent being, contingent upon severability of mind from matter. There are numerous problems with that idea not the least of which is ideas about what matter or energy is or are. Besides, a soul in my opinion is the information God has about what a human is; a record of his life, and address of each particle comprising the form of beings etc. God can recreate that soul from dust if He prefers to. The soul might be said to be information. God hasn't data-loss issues.

In my opinion God would have a far more subtle math (actually foreknowing all answers to any equation making calculations superfluous) regarding data mapping a soul than phase space maps of Hilbert Space information. Wiki has an article on phase space- "Expectation values in phase-space quantization are obtained isomorphically to tracing operator observables with the density matrix in Hilbert space: they are obtained by phase-space integrals of observables, with the Wigner quasi-probability distribution effectively serving as a measure." 

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_space

Matter is a condition of flux from a primordial field. There is information available about photons as carriers of electro-magnetic field, and how there actually are two kinds of photons; those that do not interact and those that do at short range breaking into virtual particles, electrons etc. Photons are emergent characteristics of a form of energy and the entire field behavior of photons is a metaphor for gravity and gravitons perhaps including dark energy.

Max Tegmark of M.I.T. has described a Universe or Multiverse with a foundation of pure mathematics; literally. The quanta or point has form that becomes the Universe as a context of relations. Yet the entire Multiverse complexity from the shape or form of Multi-dimensional matrices is itself a field perhaps in spirit. Sprit (of God) generating a Universe in some mysterious way was described by a neo-Platonist philosopher named Plotinus in 54 little tractates known as The Enneads.

I wanted to note that healthy minds have free will. Use reductio ad absurdam and contemplate that no one has free will to make choices and getting to work, stopping at Starbucks or not, making decisions concerning work etc and are all done automatically without free will. It gets rather silly to consider. Not all humans are healthy of course; all prisoners or people being put on felony trial should have free Magnetic Resonance brains cans and blood tests (if they aren't harmful) to inform courts of the health of the accused. Impaired free will may allow elements of determinism to enter. It is not an either/or.

 Determinism would occur where a finite, Newtonian mechanical system could account for all of the behavioral conditions of matter within a given environment. Experimentalists as is well known are a meta-factor corrupting the finite experimental condition, yet one may use thought experiments such as with mathematics and do so without corruption; maybe. There are always the problems of uncertainty and experimentalist bias existing even within thought experiments regarding math that influence results. That is easily demonstrated on math exams.

With Bishop Berkeley one might develop a bias toward the opinion that everything is idea and that mind determines matter; even if it is the mind of God, and that mass and energy are made at the smallest level of spirit; a field spirit, that allows relationships and differentiated forms to arise that have the quality of solid being in a steady state field decohered from the realm of quantum uncertainty whereat all possible positions of particles exist simultaneously as if they were in a great spiritual field calculating engine that a spirit-actuator set to utility.