About the First People Exploration Culture of North America

One could use Toynbee's criteria of civilization and conclude that the Aztec, Maya and Inca civilizations were successful rather than failed civilizations. Civilization may have stages of growth, maturity and decadence. In Meso-America there was a succession of cultures that might be said to have overlapped and built upon others before.

Across North America successful cultures arose that adapted to the sometimes plentiful, sometimes harsh conditions environmentally. One thinks of the tour de force of Arctic ice survival of Yupik hunters waiting for a seal in a land without forests for burning fires or building homes. If one spends even one winter without heat in a tent north of sixty degrees its possible to get an idea of the level of survival competence and adaptation required-one didn't go into Wal-Mart for another Bic (they had seal oil and moss wick lamps).

The United States today may be taking the Universal phase in the Toynbee cycle-the highest before collapse-and corruption seems to be becoming institutionalized these years from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue. It has over-expanded abroad, taken on vast debt, allowed itself to be flooded by an external proletariat and in sundry ways taken a turn away from concern about the well being of all of the citizens of the democracy in favor of concentrating wealth. Hardly necessary to mention the environmental management failure.

Native Americans were of course originally from several locations in the old world. People landed upon Crete by water-raft as long ago as 25,000 years. If they arrived by accident then assuredly people also arrived accidentally via the Gulf Stream and rich fisheries as long ago as 30,000 years B.P. Some archeological sites in South America seem to indicate sites as old as that.

Via Berengia and Alaska before the end of the Wisconsin Ice Age some may have canoed down the Pacific Coast. When the continental and western ice sheets parted enough a new route to Montana developed from Alaska and waves of immigrants from Eurasia arrived to journey south generally.

Of course the Aleuts invented the fasted human powered boat-the kayak-until recent times. Yet Alaska remained sparsely populated I would guess as the new age explorers ventured across the great land to unsettled points everywhere. America north of present day Mexico had at most about 2 or 3 million pre-Columbian natives, yet the population of the hemisphere was far more-enough that perhaps 16 million perished from a variety of causes in the decades following the discovery by Columbus. The population of natives in the U.S.A. declined to 500,000.

The numerous cultures of the sundry tribes made quite successful adaptations to the new world. These explorers and decedents reached the Northern Arctic littoral about 25,000 B.C. and in historical waves journeyed far to the east and south when the way opened to human foot travel.

Just because a culture or civlization ends it does not follow that it was not successful in its day-neither are people failures because they are mortal and destined for dust (or hell unless saved through the grace of God). One cannot say that Periclean Athens or even Sparta were failures because they no longer exist. There are elements of cultures from the Pre-Columbian era that still exit obviously, and of course the cultivation of the potato changed Irish culture for the good except for the blight a few years.

Of course far later pre-Dorset Eskimo were wiped out by Dorsett Eskimo with dog sleds for very fast travel. They reached the eat coast of Canada about the same time as early Irish and Viking explorers. Frobisher Bay's natives that still remember when martin Frobisher arrived early in the 1500s only arrived themselves a couple hundred years before.

Native cultures are of course pressured into becoming part of world civilization a Toynbee called it. Western civilization and that of the East were the last two 'successful' civilizations yet they too were merged into world civilization. It is virtually impossible to separate technology from culture anywhere, and global economics have made all cultures versions of a local tool using culture.

It is said that Cheetah-Tarzan's chimpanzee-actually it was the third chimp following two earlier very likely-died a couple days ago. In Tarzan's 1930s there were still several very isolated cultures, yet today none can escape the corruption. Capitalism run amok fails Adam Smiths goal of promoting an antidote to aristocratic domination of democracy. Native peoples hadn't the problem that ossified civilizations present generally-except perhaps in Aztec land where the shortage of human sacrifices meant they needed to look abroad for victims.

There was a great though short lived civilization named Cohokia at the site of present day East St. Louis with very large pyramids at one end of a gaming court with a very fine clay covered with sand place that was the equivalent of the super bowl of spear throwing at a target. The Cohokians manufactured a hockey puck-yo yo like object that was exported as far as the Texas and S. Carolina regions where some sorts of games (and pyramidal mounds) were also played or built. It is difficult to say where those Cohokians got there game from, much less their pyramid idea. Very little trade seems to have existed between the Missourians and the Aztecs.

Plainly though, the mostly non-violent (well comparatively) Cohokian in their declining phase experienced radical change. In less than a 150 year the civilization vanished along with the culture of aggregated non-Cohokian tribes serving it agriculturally. Someplace in North Dakota a village wall was excavated several year ago, and there was evidence of human remains and a massacre at that wall, and indications of a mass infantry-like charge with weapon-this was though to be unknown behavior in North America then, and occurred after the fall of Cohokia. What could it mean?

I wondered if Cohokia was simulated by arrivals from Europe-perhaps Irish or Vikings in the 13th century a.d. who traveled mostly by water and Wisconsin to arrive logically in St. Louis and recruit the natives to build a pyramid-something like Michael Cain in 'The Man Who Would Be King'. Well-very challenging to consider-yet the fascinating history of America and the explorer that wandered to and around it will be good for archeologists and writers for some time.

The early Americans or first peoples, and the second etc. hadn't the sedentary and intensely populous life and competition that stimulated the eventual rise of civilization in Eurasia-Africa etc. The first arrowhead was made in Africa about 200,000 year ago and it took another 190,000 years for a civilization to develop. The Americans mostly left Eurasia before anything much was made besides hunter gathering tools, rabbit snares etc. With so few people they had no need to develop cities, stone walls and so forth. Yet one can see how quickly they became skilled horsemen after the Spaniard brought the horse to North America, and of course skilled horse warriors. One should recall that it was largely Attila the Hun and his mounted warriors with lassos that shocked and awed the decadent Roman Empire.

The lesson of the value of cavalry and the need for fortifications accelerated in America too as forts were built by the Spaniard and attacked by Frobisher and Drake. Custer dying at the Little Big Horn was a Union cavalry officer that fought for Grant in the 2nd wilderness campaign. His brother, the two-time Medal of Honor recipient, perished with him on that grassy knoll, when Crazy Horse' band brought about a logical infantry defeat in detail purpose to the battlefield.

The advance of technology in Native American cultures was consistent with the demographic and geographic history of the advance and dispersion of the first peoples to the two continents. They were probably responsible for exterminating 16 of the 100 or so Native American mammals that weight 100 pounds or more. Modern Americans are doing better than that I would think with a record of specie extermination extending into the hundreds of thousands including all forms of life.

The failure of the present American cultural branch in politics to provide free health care for the poor and let the privileged pay for their own health care, the failure to abandon fossil fuel engines and move to advanced electro-magnetic public transport, indicates that the continuing demographic intensification of population growth and resource depletion may be moving toward a critical and dumb time of troubles.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8993313723654914866 The Secret of El Dorado

President Obama's Queer Influence in Review

Federal hate speech was a good present for the corporate Internet world permitting the deletion of non-conformist language whenever its useful to purge writing accounts-that is with a covering of federal support for corporate Internet dictatorship of the corporate will.
Hate speech I would think needs to be determined by the entire context of something written instead of by the presence of a few words that it o.k. for the object group themselves to use publicly yet not for anyone else if they are in political opposition.

With the Presidential conquest of the Pentagon's don't ask, don't tell policy and all of the faggoted political surge of last year and this in a number of areas it must seem like clear sailing for the powers of federal sin-the largest of which is the impoverishment of the middle class and real politick support for the concentration of wealth.

Four letter words may indicate hate if in a context of violence or urging violence yet be terms of endearment for some persons of interest I would think. The idea that it requires particular words to say things hateful or in a mood of hate is to separate language from actions, or to make language itself an action. If the broadcast media could be held accountable for hateful speech targeting individuals they too could be deleted from earnings and future considerations-yet of course they advocate in support of the rich and powerful organizations.

Free speech should be tolerated in the corporate Internet world inclusive of most writing places. If there are particular proscribed words the corporate doom decrees hold as self-evident expressions of hate they should be posted in scarlet letters where no writer could miss seeing them. It seems though that the corporate controllers most often like to keep their list of 'hate speech' items to themselves and entirely subjective opinion in order to have some sort of Soviet-censorship quality power to delete the politically non-conformist to the will of an ad hoc evil empire.

It may be that the word 'faggot' was kindled by the flaming homosexuals themselves in old London using a cigarette butt, salaciously sucking the tobacco down close, to communicate their coded sexual preferences in a safe manner in public, or not.

Homosexual abbreviated to homo may not be the best hope of homos-yet it is plain language effective and concise. After a winter camping in Anchorage in a tent after being banned from earning my customary 150 monthly at Helium two years ago for using two or three words to refer to queers my opinion is that the action of cutting off my earnings for writing was far more hateful than any action I took writing in opposition to the political putsch to queer the U.S. military and pervert the establishment of heterosexual marriage by including the homos. I invested time and money getting a bachelor’s Degree from the University of the State of N.Y. before they made queer marriages allright this year. I would pay the Excelsior College to take the useless degree back in order to sever any association with the state of dishonor.
I might also say for the benefit of the elitist vermin of Boston censorship (that isn't hate speech its simply my opinion) that to corrupt the word 'gay' to use as a reference to queers is an overt hate speech act a far as any straight guy named Gary is concerned.

The federal government corrupted the free speech of the masses for the benefit of corporate power and oppression when they generated their odious 'hate speech' laws. The core of social issue is not political speech written reasonably on political topics, but abuse of actual individuals personally. If an author is writing objectively about a class of social behavior in order to express his opinion on a political topic he is not obligated to use any particular language to do so. People may criticize the style of writing however it is in no way necessary or even reasonable to believe that personal hate of anyone, or that anything more than self-defense and defense of one's political interests is required to use language unliked by those holding an opposite political opinion.

The rich, the government and powerful organizations perennial have an extreme advantage over individual in political economy. The power to censor is one of the larger intolerances of all in a free society-one too often used and abused by the powerful, corrupt swine taking the nation down the path to perdition (whomever they are).

Constitution Gives State' Right to Control Immigration-Feds to Control Naturalization Criteria

from Article 1 Section Two- " Clause 3: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons "

This article's mention of 3/5ths of all other persons in a state could be applied to slaves or illegal aliens equally well today. The framers of the constitution had their oars in the water so far as to realize that real people-even slaves or illegal aliens, have real consequences and should be accounted for within a state.

If 3/5s of illegal aliens in Texas or California were counted for congressional representation purposes each would gain several seats. This reality ought not to have been cancelled by the 13th Amendment ending slavery at all.

http://www.federalistblog.us/2006/07/delegated_powers_immigration/

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html

The 14th amendment has been pointed out as affecting article, yet it actually by-passes the illegal alien or uncounted persons question and address only citizens in whole numbers rather than a 3/5ths. Yet the 3/5s probably is more applicable to demographic totals and a fair reckoning of what value non-citizens should have in counting for electoral representation than as some sort of statement about a slave being counted as worth 3/5th of a free voter in Massachusetts or Mississippi.

Regardless of the legal status of a person-homeless of land owner, the individuals existing are real and effect the political economy. When slaves were recognized as citizen if native born, or blacks as free born, and hence were inalienably citizens it became de trop to regard their votes or numbers to rate as 3/5s of the value of a non-oppressed voter. The people of the late 18th and 19th centuries did not have much of an illegal alien problem though, for which the original article One section Two of the Constitution is a reality check of political pragmatism today.

from Article 1 Section. 9.

"The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person."

This section acknowledges the states individually have the right to choose to admit or deny immigrants. The constitution provides the federal government the right to make criteria for the naturalization of immigrants as citizens, yet that does not cancel the state's rights to choose who to allow to immigrate.

Article. IV.

Section. 1.

"Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof."

Liberate Public Education

Political contentiousness and interpretation of symbolic meanings never end in the litigious world of Washington D.C. So many litigation court hours were spent removing manger scenes from public court buildings and other public areas and so forth that the government expressed an inability to harmonize public mass education with the will of people to be free to exercise religious expression publicly including public schools. If the federal government forces minors to attend school until the 8th grade instead of doing something useful like brick making then it should not force them to stifle their free speech on religious expression.

To harmonize the different public interests the government should get out of the public school business and pay students to attend private schools of their choice with the government role simply being to assure quality control for all students.

Only students of the poor and middle class should receive subsidized public education, only the poor should receive free public medical services, and only the rich should be taxed at 60% including capital gains.

Diversity in public education means strength of independent thinking rather than Soviet and Nazi style indoctrination.

Philosophy as Rigorous Science, Chat, Thought or Whatever

Philosophical thought may be about finding meaning or whatever else is 'wise'. Wisdom may be simplicity or awareness of the truth within a convoluted social world with litigious minutia destroying the woods and the trees. Sartre wrote his 'Being and Nothingness' during World War Two Paris after being released by the Nazis from a p.o.w. camp. He wrote 'Critique of Dialectical Reason' and lost an eye during the venture, and also visted Stalinist Russia. One might consider his work unrigorous since it has no math symbols, yet it is a good way of viewing human social organizations with a different lens-simultaneously phenomenally and sociologically even with individual and collective epistemology baed on analysis on cognitive subjectivity.

Edmund Husserl was a philosopher born in 1859 determined eventually to make philosophy a rigorous science. He wrote quite a lot with titles like 'Logical Investigations'. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that his later works were helpful in relating scientific ideas to pre-scientific conceptual paradigms. Husserl was a phenomenologist.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl/

One may find rather readily quite a bit of depth in philosophical history of logic. Of course one remembers Aristotle' invention of classical logic, then one can skip to Leibniz' invention of mathematical logic that he kept in a drawer and never published, and on to Frege, Russell and eventually the 20th century analytic philosophers. The development of symbolic logic then use of it in an expanding permutation of forms found use in things from computer programming to algebra and SO3 groups etc.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/probability-interpret/

That philosophical development of formal logic has had quite a number of individuals that have put work into it from Strawson to Kripke (Naming and Necessity). One may expand one' own interest in logic over decades if given an opportunity, yet one also might wish to apply such rigorous thought to the world of perceptions and even cosmology.

Individuals may read logic and epistemologies derived from it and apply it as a filter to consider the works of philosophers like Immanuel Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' or simply to reading a newspaper and discovering commonplace logic fallacies in politics. Philosophical thought may lead one to an awareness of the inadequacy of the mundane social existence, of why reality T.V. and soap operas haven't much prospect for making the world utopia, or why the reorganization of society into a better functioning organization de facto is so challenging. Not all philosophical thought is along the lines of a technical occupation pursuit with guaranteed pay.

Many people with graduate degrees in philosophy become lawyers or else in order to draw a paycheck-not a bad idea either. Nearly a quarter of lawyers get into another occupation within a few years. Considering society without a paycheck may free one a little from corporate control and the threat of termination if one does not hush-that's why so many executives are fairly mute in politics today except for sycophantic utterances.

It is a good thing to have a rigorous approach to knowledge and run experiments. It is also interesting to have a disciplined approach to reading as much of the world's knowledge concerning philosophy as one may in a lifetime, yet of course the time runs out and one is left with faith and hope that The Lord will accomplish His miracles. One must try to apply one-self a little earlier then to apply rigorous methods to faith activities-perhaps the mere Lutheran style of reform bringing a Priesthood of Believers to graduate beyond the hierarchical priesthood left over from the feudal era...there are many disciplined activities for philosophers today and not all require scientific method.

On the premise that 'Anything is morally acceptable to prevent global ecosphere collapse."

I was wondering about that-nice thought. Means and ends issues though. I think its possible that if society is really rotten at heart that one might have to let it go destroy itself with a clear conscience and rely on God to save the elect.

Its also the case practically that social rule becomes increasingly corrupt in the public and corporate sectors as individualism is annihilated and collective power is concentrated. The people in governmemnt and the corporate world with so much power may be the least likely to fix anything in an ordinary Utopian perfection acceptable to perfectionists.

Merry Christmas.

On the History and Concept of the Theory That the World Is an Illusion

That the world’s objects change and decay ordinarily, and that the sky and seasons appear to change obviously provided an observation opportunity for early philosophers to regard and hypothesize as being temporal and illusory perhaps even derived from a perfect world of designs or forms. Plato described an ideal world of changeless forms, while Sakyamuni considered the temporal world Maya- illusion.

The idea of illusion and dualism is anthropolgically primordial. One finds its elements in the religious evolutions from Europe-India through the Vedic and in Zoroastrianism. Hegelianist evolution of the spirit as a world consciousness is another form. Neitzche and Shopenhauer were influenced by Zoroastrian ideas-the latter believed the world is an illusory, bad world with an implicit nature of evil (The World as Will and Representation). Karl Marx was inflluenced by a dualist criteria as a student of Hegel and his dialectical evolution is a kind of godless evolution toward utopian social reality through the maya of social dichord.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_(illusion)

The Mayan calendar expiring in 2012 is held by some to be a reason to tour in the Yucatan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Vedic_religion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Iranian_religion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_religion

http://dunedinschool.wordpress.com/category/religion/purification/ death of Mithridates by Zarathustran king

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism Ahura Mazada (good) vs.forces of chaos (druj) (bad)

With the pain and suffering of this world, with extended unemployment and the impermanence of lot ownership, one may regard the experience of life itself as illusory. With relativity and the evolution of time the manifestation of actualized forms may take unusual, unpredictable twits and turns. Even the calculation of probabilities is saturated with uncertainty including that mysterious beyond the parameters and premises potential for unknown force overthrowing the formalization of theory.

It reaches its terminal moment when as Sartre said death emerges as 'the complete triumph of the other'. What the otherness of being is that permits a universe badly defined and human beings to be and become is unknown.

It is yet challenging to posit that A is B or life is illusion. One might contemplate the odds of any existing event or process being and illusion I would guess...

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/probability-interpret/#KolProCal

One should want to define the meaning of illusion and 'world' before applying the formula 'world=illusion' and decide if it is just the Earth or all of the solar system that are illusory. At some point in the Universal set there must be some real or existing entity for which the world is an illusion. If everything were an illusion without a real observer one might have an interesting cosmology yet an improbable one.

One may opt with Kierkeguaard to rely upon the transcending power and person of Jesus Christ to establish an eternal relationship with ‘The One’ God.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_of_faith

The solid-state mass of this universe is at the smallest conjectured level believed to be energy. E=mc2 at least indicates the convertibility of energy into matter. Matter can be regarded as a steady state of energy. Energy is 'locked' into a steady state as mass. If one reads about the nuclear mechanic of the sun as a hydrogen star, and learn about the production of helium etc, and also about the primordial creation of baryons early in the history of the present math of cosmological theory one is reading of energy and mass as a steady state.

Simultaneously mass and energy are believed to be sustained immediately by a quantum field.

Quantum superposition and entanglement of particles, the wave-particle duality of mass-energy (vis the double slit photon experiment) is a remarkable field to read about. Quantum particles for themselves may exist in a field of uncertain nature in other dimensions that extrudes into the four dimensional universe and is snared by virtue of relations to other particles probabilities of cancelled out of being elsewhere into a steady state.

The mechanics of the underlying fields are unknown. How the steady state field relates to the underlying sustaining field is uncertain. Does time exist in that quantum field where every particle can be anyplace in it universe and doe not appear in this one until observed or entangled? Does relativity apply in the quantum field as it does in this universe with four dimensions?

The question of the universe being an illusion or not is really the wrong question. It’s real enough for what it is, and there are real sentient beings living in it. An illusion is a contingent term given a particular value like all other words I would think. Is the Universe like some other illusion, or is it like an emergent and apparent relative phenomena like the apparent wind speed aboard a sailboat of zero when it sailing along in a ten mile an hour wind from the stern with 100% efficiency?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc

Augustine and Ontological Relativity

I wanted to mention Plotinus' neo-Platonism and his exposition of Platonism in The Enneads. Socrates at least believed in God, and the concept of One being emanating everything that exists seems the better interpretation of Plato extent. It was written only about 600 years after, in a language still pretty much like that of Plato.

Numbers are an expression of divisible relations-or an early form of relativity I would think. Natural numbers, rational numbers or Cantor's trans-infinite infinities with given ordinal relations that cannot be sub-divided infinitely (as in the Eleatic paradoxes) are a way the mind made order in representative structure...abstract structures necessarily about reality. The problem as Russell might have pointed out is a categorical error in language about where to categorize abstract idea and designs. As a Christian I have no trouble with any of the opinions because I think God can keep track of the math and quanta of all sorts.

The work of ordering and formalizing expressions of interval and structure with signs is accomplished in-the-world, and there isn't much difference between the mind as a field with trillions of synaptic connection routes processing sense input in its particular way in the unified temporal field of the Universe and the world itself except qualitatively. That is the mind and nature are phenomenal and integral within the fundamental universal monism.

Augustine could easily regard thought as valuable in a special or even Hegelian way. Because of the Creator's relationship to mankind it is ideas and relationships that are consequential. The Spirit of God transcends the material world or encompasses it, and Leibniz's spiritual one-dimensional monads or thoughts about the Intellect emanated by The One lead to the cloud of unknowing's mystery.

Augustine's penetrating examination of abstract objects as being real is something of a very early analytic philosophy as well as Platonist. Strawson's' Individuals' and Quine's Word and Object’ follow up the relationship of ideas to the real world, and improve upon the empiricism of the era that was ending and being surpassed by ontological relativity in epistemology.

The transcendence of classical realism for a phenomenalism and a subjective epistemology unified with the corporeal is a modern point of view. Mind is grounded in the noumenal and the quantum realm of probability statistics as well as naive reality taken as unshakable by traditional empiricists.

Plotinus points out a hierarchy of relations from The One to the Intellect, the realm of forms and the real world with so many examples of broken forms. One might take that as a fair approximation of the concept that fundamental structure given to quantum mechanical energy have an 'intelligible object' content as well as mass or energy. One might wonder if the way that quantum mechanical particles exist with concurrent uncertainty and determinism overall is not an illustration of the way the realm of forms downloads its designs into the actual solid-state universe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noumenon