23 May 2019

On Morality...cont.

 In post-Calvin Geneva some of the pastors were described by outsiders as Socinians. They were unhappy with that. Socinians had taken the trinity out of theology and some of the churches promoted reason over scripture. Much of the American church has gone that way. The Unitarian Church of Transylvania apparently were Socinians and the left wants to make the Protestant branch a cuddly promoter of all leftist platform ideas. That can trick people of course regarding true doctrine and scriptural interpretation. The trouble is that the Holy Spirit does allow people to interpret scripture for-themselves and their understanding. Because of reformation tolerance or even accentuation of self-interpretation instead of Catholic authorities the rise of fake Christian churches was inevitable. Within those structures the left can claim whatever they like as righteous doctrine including murdering the unborn. Plainly from the life of Jesus while in Mary's womb there was implicit recognition of the sentience of the unborn, although for Jesus the sentience range was increased.

 One shouldn't forget Marcus Tullius Cicero's 'On Natural Law'. It is an argument that nature itself has an evident preferred moral behavior- such as parents don't eat progeny. I took a course on-line from Yale/Coursera recently on everyday morality. It was interesting to learn what they think in academia. They tend to write-off deontological ethical systems, including that of Immanuel Kant and his idea of the categorical imperative. There is a kind of list of moral values that people select from, and the left tend to value individualism and freedom from harm as about it, while conservatives also include a few others like honor that is lacking in the left. Morality can be defined in several ways, objectively. The easiest way is to regard it as social behavior and norms that people actually have in fact, and then describe that as their moral system, rather than describing some ideal way they might say they have or aspire to. The left also want to find a primitive morality hard-wired in babies. Calvin believed that God communicates basic moral values through conscience, and Christians go farther through the Holy Spirit toward realizing what right behavior is. Here is more on that topic--Searching for some sort of innate morality in babies that could be taken as a cognitive characteristic such that people are hard-wired to certain behaviors that he can regard as moral seems sketchy.

Morality is an ability to differentiate between abstract values rather than natural behavior for-itself. The difference between defecating in public or in a toilet stall is a moral and legal question perhaps, yet a dog or a baby defecating on the floor isn't taken to be a moral question they have flunked.
Moral philosophy isn't about unavoidable deterministic behavior. Animals pursue with personal egoism perhaps, things that are good for them, or that they believe to be good. An example would be youthful alcoholism. maybe a child discovers that drinking gin and orange juice or whatever is good, or tastes good, so they continue even though it is bad for their health. If creme puffs were actually poisonous and bad, people would eat them anyway of they didn't know better. The pursuit of what is thought to be the immediate good is not a moral question.

Socrates wanted to show that human children may have innate knowledge in one part of The Meno in a famous passage of 1900 words where he interviews a slave boy. Cicero wrote a discourse On Natural Law. The babies interpreting fair distribution or unequal distribution were not perhaps showing a moral sense. They have have transferred their own worldview into the two characters and preferred a balanced rather than an unfair or unequal distribution for-themselves. The babies may have liked or disliked a triangle shape more than a square, or alternatively have required more time to understand a complex image in regard to a triangle and sphere vs a square and sphere in motion. A triangle has slope and a square has only angles.

While morality may be what people actual do. It is a culturally based social dialect and an evolutionary praxis of change. Its realm may be stretched and broken as a society expands or is broken, so chaos and moral breakdown occurs.

One should not overuse moral reductionism to posit that like a Universe expanding from a singularity, the moral state of mankind is a kernel within babies that grows into adulthood. While some adults are simplistic regarding moral behavior and world view, and some societies are simplistic in behavior and world view in some historical periods, in the modern world, given the possible ranges of freedom of motion and action of human beings as a physical being, moral values are chosen, accepted as true dogma, and so forth, intentionally rather than automatically.

Anyone can understand that putting a hand on a stove burns. Babies vicariously understand that about others. Adults often lack that capacity and willfully persecute others at a distance with modern tools of they can on the basis of rumor. The gang morality of organizations and collectives for pursuing people to victimize is an exaggeration of the profit motive or pursuit of the good narrowly that is expanded into mass organizational moral values.

Organizational morality can have good or bad values, and designate those values like algebraic literals wherein one drops in the meaning such that it supports organizational goals.

On the Right of the Left to Murder the Unborn on Fake Christian Grounds

In post-Calvin Geneva some of the pastors were described by outsiders as Socinians. They were unhappy with that. Socinians had taken the trinity out of theology and some of the churches promoted reason over scripture. Much of the American church has gone that way. The Unitarian Church of Transylvania apparently were Socinians and the left wants to make the Protestant branch a cuddly promoter of all leftist platform ideas. That can trick people of course regarding true doctrine and scriptural interpretation. The trouble is that the Holy Spirit does allow people to interpret scripture for-themselves and their understanding. Because of reformation tolerance or even accentuation of self-interpretation instead of Catholic authorities the rise of fake Christian churches was inevitable. Within those structures the left can claim whatever they like as righteous doctrine including murdering the unborn. Plainly from the life of Jesus while in Mary's womb there was implicit recognition of the sentience of the unborn, although for Jesus the sentience range was increased.

Police Facial Recog Systems May Identify Wanted Criminals- Democrats Hate That

Police use of facial recognition systems are coming under some media and civic attack- such as San Francisco where they were banned, because they potentially can recognize wanted criminals, illegal aliens and fugitives from the law that might otherwise pass unrecognized by a patrolman. The expert systems are an upgrade to fingerprint and I.D. scans that policemen can employ to verify that a possible suspect is or is not already wanted.

With so many tens of millions of undocumented people in the United States the possibility that a policeman will remember the face of some hundreds of thousands of fugitives from the law when encountering one is non-existent. Facial recognition systems are about the only way law enforcement people can sort through the bins of billions of individuals that live in or may travel through the United States each year.


Lawless cities that would prefer to allow terrorists and law breakers of various kinds to drift through the masses incognito are not helping to secure public safety at all in banning face recognition systems.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/15/san-francisco-bans-police-use-of-face-recognition-technology.html


https://gizmodo.com/we-dont-need-to-pause-police-use-of-face-recognition-we-1834958605

Certainly democrats could abuse the system and track people as ruthlessly as corporations track smart phone locations and with rtf scanners and sales record follow the location of many citizens already. It is the private sector corporate world with the use of face recognition system that has the greatest capacity to abuse the data. While law enforcement agencies use the technology to sustain public safety the corporate world already has the ability to use it for whatever critical collusions or scientific purposes they like without public review. Public review of law enforcement uses of face recognition technology should exist in camera each year to confirm that it isn't being used with nefarious application as might a zodiac killer use the technology to sort out and track his victims, or a very old and rich University study society to learn who it prefers to delete economically.



22 May 2019

Every Citizen Should Care About Public Debt

Classical virtue is relevant even in an era of mass media social conditioning and commercialism. If one learns anything from history it is that societies function best with virtuous citizens. One should work for the ideal state regardless of one’s personal longevity or lack of. Socrates didn’t fear death, he was concerned about acting without virtue and truth. Public debt is not good though many would rationalize it away.
John Calvin, the reformer, acquiesced with the idea of loaning money, yet felt that interest should only be charged on the rich that can afford it. The public cannot well afford vast public debt one-third of which is held by foreign entities. It is the poor that lose out to pay for the debt. The British American Revolutionary war loans and interest thereof were not paid off until nearly the start of the 2oth century. Social spending in England was minimized to pay the debt down, and Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in those poor English circumstances.
Though one cannot accomplish construction or maintenance of the ideal state alone, citizens should work as best they can toward those social ends that best serve the people, the democracy, and the well being of others. Concern for others as well as oneself are not only Christian values they are classical values that pre-exist even Hellenic Greece.
To live a life without pursuit of virtue or truth if one can, is in a sense to fail at life Being a good citizen and human being concerned with working for virtue in even a small way may not get one to heaven, for one needs the Lord to enact that, yet it does make humanity itself a little better, and human works brighter and more honorable.

Send Your Name to Mars on the Mars 2020 Mission

N.A.S.A. is placing anyone's name that cares to on a chip aboard the Mars 2020 mission. The little Rover will see the sights and report.

This is the website... https://mars.nasa.gov/participate/send-your-name/mars2020

i.e.

Isn't It Time to Rethink Shoes

Isn't it time to rethink shoe manufacture in the United States? American shoes for ordinary people have been made in China, Thailand or elsewhere far too much since the end of the Sally Fields-Paul Newman era. Bring shoe manufacture back to the United States with three-part designer print on demand shoes.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48360373

Every shoe-store and Wal-mart could have print on demand three part shoes made for the customer live. It would end the need to send so many jobs overseas.

Store shoe production could have pre-fabbed mesh with spray on materials. There could be air-filled inner soles. Modular pieces could snap or lock together, perhaps be removable-even transformative. Innumerable ways and menus for custom and standard models could be selected by a customer.


For Democrats It's 'How Do I Hate Thee Trump, Let Me Count the Ways'

The title holder for that dubious honor must be Abraham Lincoln. He might have been qualitatively hated as much as quantitatively. After that maybe people thought rudely of Herbert Hover. President Trump is hated by Democrats, yet that is very partisan. They hated Richard Nixon equally well. George W. Bush was badly thought of by many Democrats and even some Republicans.
People even hated Ronald Reagan. Riding a Greyhound bus from Reno circa 1981 I remember a guy with a Bohemian accent saying aloud the first ten miles- “Ronald Reagan, Donald Duck, Ronald Reagan, Donald Duck…”

Can Pres Trump Fix the V.A. or Would House Democrats 'Gin to Spite Him?

Why the V.A. hospital system doesn't work is an enigma wrapped in a mystery. Various Presidents have appointed generals to lead it that work and drift to retirement without making it resemble any sort of state of the art facility. President Trump might be the right guy to fix the system yet House Democrats might vote against any sort of upgrade of the system just to spite the President.

Why the system is broken at least is part could be something related to the inability of administrators at particular hospitals to hire and fire their own people to work there. In the private sector hospital administrators can hire and fire people without concern for civil service and union sorts of things that make personnel choice non-discretionary for the administrator. Maybe President Trump could design some kind of work around so hospital staff can be improved in quality.

Not all V.A. staff are over-promoted bureaucrats by any means. Some are quite good. Often they soon move on. Why? That is beyond my knowledge. With all the money they need apparently, the hospitals just don't have a good patient trough-put rate at least for dentists. Maybe the President needs to find some highly qualified hospital administrator and systems analyst to discover why individual hospitals cannot be upgraded in efficiency and patient satisfaction.

US Bridgework Outreach to Former Foreign Allies



China routinely hates on America but loves the way capitalists are fulfilling Lenin’s maxim about selling us the rope we hang them with. Mexico has tended to be an adversary as was Canada yet the later was on the allied side in WW II, so we forget that war was only necessary because of our blundering into the first war.
Switzerland has been a good ally receiving deposits of rich people that don’t want to be traced. Australia is sometimes a friend for practical reasons concerning China and England. Poland is and ally because it is obsessive about Russia. Germany is like an ally because it declared war on us in the Second World War yet graciously lost so became good friends. The same applies to Japan I guess.
Eastern Europe is a good place to look for allies. Transylvania should be skipped perhaps since it is probably a Democrat stronghold.
Iran was a friendly nation; mildly, until the C.I.A. coup to get rid of the Prime Minister and restore the Shah in 1953. The Iran parliament had nationalized British oil fields so the fear of communism led to the paranoid response. The Saudi did the same later and no coup was launched. After the next conflict with Iran is over and the dust settles maybe Islamic radicalism can be overcome and a new age of decadence be constructed, some would think destructive, in Teheran.
France is a good ally because its women sound so nice speaking that language. The guys should speak German perhaps to sound more macho. France is more of a neutral in military affairs, yet is wedded to the European Community these days while England is in the midst of a sloppy, contested divorce with that clan.
Building bridges to those people will have to wait until the bridges are paid for in Afghanistan and Iraq where our new friends are, if something less than allies.

21 May 2019

Make the China Trade War Become a 50-Year Trade Ban

American farmers had plenty of customers before the China trade took off. There are still plenty of hungry people on Earth, so the China trade war may actually be a blessing in disguise to American farmers as it may require some intelligent political work to provide some cooperative leadership making adjustments.

China is a large market as well as producer, so taking it off-line from the United States can only be for the good for Americans concerned about getting global capitalists to locate state-of-the-art manufacturing technology in the United States if they want to sell to American consumers.

Nearly fifty million Americans have less than a half of one percent of the national income. Wealth is largely concentrated in the United States in the hands of a small minority of the people. 

What I mean is that there are perhaps one-hundred million citizens that could use a pay increase, stable employment with benefits and good wages. The 1% that own everything have gutted benefits and job stability in the midst of all of their outsourcing and downsizing. They have let the national infrastructure decay and failed to invest in America. They have even had vast tax cuts in order to invest in China. They hide behind the middle and upper middle class in order to prevent tax increases for themselves too.

The most wealth have transferred so much technology to China as well as manufacturing that the United States is losing its creative edge. America has some of the slowest internet and train speed in the first world. There is vast public debt- 22 trillion dollars of it. People would like to see the United States actually get better technologically, economically and environmentally becoming leaders again in mass social improvement. Quitting the China trade could help accomplish that. Hopefully the trade war will escalate to a trade ban for half a century.

Why Should Congress Be Free to Use Tax Returns to Harass a President?

Should a party of losers (the Democrats) in the last Presidential election be free to demand the President's tax returns in order to have more material to harass him with? If there was anything criminal in the tax returns the I.R.S. should have caught that the past few decades. Exploiting tax returns without plain evidence of a crime is a fishing expedition to harass the President and to try to do him financial and political injury while they can.


Sure the most rich should pay higher taxes. Using the President's tax returns to learn his business practices better and to have material to use against him in the 2020 Presidential campaign is simply hitting below the belt.

Democrats in Congress have shown a lack of class and integrity in pursuing the President through any and all means after the Mueller Report was not able to recommend some sort of indictment or plain proof of Donald Trump working with Russians through some illegal means to snatch the job of President from Hillary Clinton's outstretched hands.

 The talk of impeachment before an election is even worse; there are no impeachable offenses, or a single impeachable offense that anyone is aware of. Democrats just don't like President Trump. Democrats were the party of slavery, and the master mentality seems to infect the party leadership still such that they feel a right to have their way all the way to hell. Impeaching the President not for getting blow jobs in the Oval Office or lying under oath to Congress, but for defending himself lawfully against a year's-long Democrat hate party seeking to cut off his nuts politically with the full mob leadership mentality of the broadcast media (though not 100% of that group), is the work of a desperate party without good ideas that would get them elected for-themselves,

Salt and the Confederacy

Salt being necessary for preserving meat was important to the southern forces. Before refrigeration curing meat meant salt. Mobile troops required transportable preserved meat.

Before the war the southern states imported most salt from the Caribbean. It used vast amounts of salt- 450 million pounds annually according to one author.

The Salt Wars

During the war a Union naval blockade stopped that. The south had to scramble to keep the food supply viable.




Florida was a slave state that contributed 15,000 troops to the war effort. The state with several salt works produced much southern supply. The largest salt works were at St. Andrews and Apalachee Bay.

The working conditions at salt works was often very hard. The confederates employed slaves at some sites in harsh conditions. Many died on the job. Alabama had an especially cruel salt works.

Alabama Civil War Site: Bon Secour Salt Works

Another important salt works was at Saltville VA. Union General George Stoneman twice attacked it. In the second battle he tore up the works and railroad tracks and took out the production a couple of months. The damage to the tracks lasted longer. It was the main eastern producer for the rebels.

Salt in the American Civil War - Wikipedia

I have wondered if one of the causes of General Lee’s starving troops was the damage to various salt works and the broken supply lines. Some confederate soldiers of the Army of Virginia went barefoot toward the end while thousands of pairs of boots were in warehouses in North Carolina that capitalists would not surrender to the war effort. Mass quantities of salt and food production sights, hog farms and so forth became scarce toward the end perhaps, comparable to Nazi production and supply attrition.

Democrat Candidates Seek Formation of Fake Christian Left

Some Democratic Presidential candidates are seeking to establish a fake Christianity for leftists that is non-trinitarian and basically Socinianism with worldiness substantial enough  to normalize favorite Democrat Party sins.

The problem of fake version of Christianity that allow sin as doctrinally hunkie dorrie is that the followers may well be, and most likely are lost. With universal literacy it would require fake Bibles with fake gospel to support homosexual marriage and abortion as sound doctrine for anyone to avoid knowing that the Christian left doctrines are godless.

Socinianism formed about the same time as the reformation and accepted the outward forms of Christianity stripped of the Trinity. It promoted reason over Biblical common sense interpretation. The pastors of Geneva took it as an insult to be called Socinians during the 16th century. Later of course, even the Unitarian Church of Transylvania accepted Socinian doctrine. The evolution of the Democratic Party faithlessness toward expropriating and gutting sound Christian doctrine is a logic progression.

20 May 2019

Put Economic Sanctions on China Permanently?

There are some solid issues that need to be resolved regarding China trade policy. It is unfortunate that a trade war was needed to get the attention of the Chinese Dictator for Life.

There are short, middle and long range repercussions for failing to solve unfair trade practices and bring them to an honest and balanced footing. A Business Insider article said there were three primary issues of the trade war; intellectual-property rules, government subsidies, and enforcement mechanisms.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/us-china-trade-war-major-sticking-points-2019-5-1028215587#intellectual-property-rules1

One cannot just ignore the corruption of China’s communist party permisiveness for disregarding patents, copyrights and so forth with lax enforcement or support for illicit use of proprietary material. There is a great information transfer going on from the west to China. That is all good for China and not so good for western producers of proprietary material. If that situation continues it is a reason to stop doing business with China and instead work with just Taiwan and Vietnam.

American businesses that want to produce in China are required to have a majority Chinese partner and open all technology accounts to the Chinese. It is a forced technology transfer in effect. That Communist redistribution rule is the cost of doing business in a Communist ruled nation. If China cannot bring itself to respect property rights of intellectual products the Trump administration might need to simply ban doing business with China eventually.

China also has government subsidies for business and that is unfair for western corporations. Honestly though, that is what communist or socialist governments do so it seems irrational to expect something else. American businesses want the cheap Chinese production costs and access to the large and growing Chinese consumer market for sales. President Trump has noticed that China isn’t willing to budge on just doing business western-style without government support for business (although America offers subsidies to businesses with (for example) the oil depletion tax allowances that are perhaps a form of back-door subsidy. A proper Confucian rectification of business would eliminate both Chinese government business subsidies and the oil depletion tax allowance.

My Ideas About Biblical Creation

I have a different point of view about creation. I learned Christianity and science together from youth, so I have never been conflicted about it. The reformation pioneer John Calvin believed people should interpret the Bible for-themselves, and that the Holy Spirit would lead them to the truth. So with that in mind my interpretation of the book of Genesis is that it is consistent generally with evolution parameters.

 It is traditional to interpret the Bible in a mostly pre-scientific era paradigm and that had nothing about modern cosmological paradigms in it, however the Bible wasn't structured such that it has parameters that are not generally permissive of an evolution paradigm under God. 


That being said, God is omnipotent, so he can 'evolve' the entire world in a second. For God, time is as a material object of no resistance. Remember that God is omniscient and omnipotent- all things including Universes exist in his mind and are actualized for-others including humans in ways that are ponderable for others yet foreknown to God. He could create an entire Universe in virtually no spatial area that would seem as vast as this one does. I wrote about some of that and made a free to download book about it.

 My ideas about the topic. http://www.lulu.com/shop/garrison-clifford-gibson/god-cosmology-and-nothingness-theory-and-theology-in-a-scientific-era/ebook/product-23976366.html


Yes Good Manners are Important

Good manners are behavior patterns that respect social boundaries similar to private property and the advantages and opportunities afforded by ownership. Respecting the private space of others allows individual pursuit of self-interests including business, invention and personal affairs.
On the other hand loutish, rude, brutal oafishness including but not limited to body slamming, verbal abuse, spitting on carpets, leaning on people in elevators, talking at a very loud volume on boring or offensive topics in public spaces where quiet is valued, taking the last five packages of sugar for a coffee in a work break room instead of just one, etc, tend to trim private pursuits of others.

An Interesting Hyperloop Video Primer


U.S. Public Debt and Economic Expansion

My thoughts on the question of U.S. public debt being a driver of national economic growth are philosophical rather than economic-technical. A trillion dollar infrastructure program here and there added to debt and economic growth together. Highway bills and defense spending that together add up to trillions drive growth- perhaps in the wrong direction partly. Meanwhile jobs were outsourced to China negating national economic growth. Taxes were cut on the rich to let them have more money to invest overseas. Some unskilled jobs were created domestically- or semi-skilled as a national sop an alibi for the tax cuts.

Student loans added to national debt yet added more college graduates with vast debt so they could pay interest to the big banks and borrow money for first homes helping the most rich to have more money to invest in China and stimulate the economy of China. That enables increased Chinese defense spending enabling increased U.S. defense spending and economic expansion in U.S. weapons manufacturing states.

Lower national unemployment attracts millions of illegal aliens (maybe 2 million annually) to surge into low-paying U.S. helping keep wages down while enabling increased economic expansion of dirty industries ecologically speaking. That is all good for corporate profits and income for the most rich. Externalities included environmental costs and mass extinction of wildlife, decayed habitat and deferred restoration and clean-up costs of trillions and trillions.

So I guess U.S. public debt helps and harms economic development simultaneously (sometimes inflation of costs and deflation of wages need occur to assure increased income for the most rich).

States Abortion Laws Concern States

Citizens of any given state theoretically should be right to make state laws that aren't in contradiction of federal laws.  Sometimes federal laws are reformed by state's challenges to federal law such that federal law moves to agreement with a particular state's law.

 The United States was formed with a large measure of the Protestant reformation sentiments about reading the Bible for oneself and the right to interpret it for-oneself instead of a government sanctioned or religious authority. There has since been a dynamic tension between those that prioritize individual liberty over autocratic government or religious power that monopolizes politics or religious matters. Alabama and other states have the right to be free from the monopolistic power of a global broadcast media that disapproves of the free choices of states and state's legislatures.

https://www.apnews.com/7a47ddc761dc4b72a017b0836da3a87b

There are of course some transcendent human principles that need be defended universally- such as individual freedom from being enslaved, yet the right to privacy permits abortion, the free for individuals in a free government to ban abortion is a universal public right that need be tolerated. Those that seek abortions and live in a state that has banned that are free to relocate to a godless atheist state where murdering the unborn is swell. The freedom for individuals to move from political conditions they regard as intolerable is another universal right.


States have the right to prevent citizens from murdering one another or the unborn. The presumption of a right to exist for the born and unborn is a logical and moral requisite.

The dynamic tension between individual rights and universal rights sometimes is eclipsed when the vast majority of individuals support the universal principle. They are then in agreement with the Kantian categorical imperative which is something like the golden rule. States right are an expression of individual rights at the public level. They are a defense against the automatic oppression of universal monopoly of power over individuals by corrupt forms of government such as are expressed in communism, socialism and monarchy.

Concerning the Lost

If anyone believed the Bible to be an 'absolute' lie, or a simple lie, it would be necessary to discover why they believed that and what that meant to them, for if false belief has no logical basis then one is conversing with someone that is logic challenged. Even so John Calvin believed that the conscience is provided by God to everyone and is a reminder of what God wants people to be; perfected as He intended. 

Jesus Christ helps with that. It may be though that some are destined to be lost and other saved (the elect), so though know one except God knows who those people are (Paul might have appeared to be lost to some Christians before conversion - although the Jewish dispensation in the Christian era is not too easy to understand always)), the challenges of explaining to the lost why they should be saved would be accomplished with scripture from memory and the Holy Spirit.