choices

If one chooses the morally right courses in life one is traveling the right path; if one is making morally wrong choices in life then one is traveling the wrong path. To be indifferent about morality and if things are good or bad, right or wrong and so forth is to live the unexamined life such as Socrates thought was of little value for a human being.

William James (the guy that wrote pragmatist philosophy from Charles Sanders Pierce's pragmaticist philosophy) wrote about forced options as being a situation when one cannot avoid making a choice, and to not make a choice results in certain consequences that happen because one did not make a choice. If a baby is lying in the street and a truck is driving toward it in the dark, and will probably crush it when it arrives in a minute and there is adequate time to safely remove it but you don't-you have made a choice even if it is non-action. Some would say a morally wrong choice was made it not walking out into the street and removing the toddler from the crush of the semi tires (18 wheels) while others would say that morality is superfluous and that nothing matters.

Sin literally means to miss the mark or target as in archery...one is sinning by not traveling the right path in life. In the largest sense the right path is renormalizing unto God, unto The One, from which all things have issued. Wickedness and worldliness want to obscure the light in the darkness-Jesus Christ-who is issued directly from The One, and dominate the world, society and universe for itself.

God is good, and there is a natural law, a natural calling that draws mankind to the right-or as the Buddha said to right speech, right though, right actions-and look what happened to that-it became left-handed Tantric Buddhism as written in the Tibetan book of the dead. Mankind will always find a way to mess things up because none are perfect, none are deserving and all fall short of perfection or as Augustine said the nature of mankind is totally depraved. In a sense Augustine was a neoCalvinist before Calvin in that he relied totally upon the grace of God for salvation from the human condition.

It isn't just that certain authorities have a proper franchise on the right way and the right things for there is corruption in high places the Apostle Paul wrote-evil wickedness and corruption are socially transcendent things and establishments on Earth normally become corrupted over time. The kingdom of Jesus is not of this world-it is a battle of powers and principalities and the interesting thing is that in the cosmogyny of the neo Platonist philosopher Plotinus from the over-lapping second and third centuries the emanation from The One goes through a series of stages and reductions to materialize as this Universe. It is a long way from the Source in a sense.

The wrong way will consistently over value the Universe yet simultaneously under-value the goodness of right moral choices...on making those one must develop a moral conscience and think for oneself reading what one can of aretaic ethics, learning about society and how it functions and understanding the social structures and spirit of each individual too in that it should be actualized and developed toward fulfillment in the morally good so far as possible. Worldly security isn't antipathetic to virtue in pursuit of the good, sublime and beautiful ad knowledge of God, instead it is as element in the compresence of life that presents one with moral choices in social guise.

In the modern world some people would transcend the reality of the phenomenal universe if they could through getting so far into it as possible that it becomes an absurdity for them. Choosing the wrong way in life intentionally is stupid basically-it is stupid like walking in front of a truck just to see if it hurts to get hit by steel moving at 70 m.p.h. One should make the inference from comparable phenomena that the right thing to do is to avoid the maladroit choice a priori. The consequences for making morally wrong choices may not be immediately present yet they do exist and so it is worth doing what is right. If one must pay a price for doing what is right that is better than to simply forfeit any chance of moral correctness by choosing what is wrong and wicked, or evil. There are times when the authorities themselves perpetrate the morally wrong as did the court that convicted Jesus Christ starting a death sentence rolling.

Jesus Christ overcame death and was resurrected-take that as a matter of faith with evidence existing too. Jesus was here to renormalize the lost humanity onto The One. If you happen to read 'The Essential Plotinus' a book with the best of the 54 tractates of Plotinus on The One named 'The Enneads' you can get a rough sketch of where Jesus came from and what this universe is although Plotinus was not a Christian. The One is absolute Spirit yet absolutely perfect-the material world is a sort of phenomenal crust of the Creator that exists with a variegated concatenation of complete and incomplete broken forms-sin and the wrong way are of the process of getting mired into broken forms and a remote universe cut off from God without faith.

Alaska

With the higher oil prices the Alaska State Government is experiencing regret that it doesn't charge a higher price to oil companies for it's oil, so it's seeking ways to increase taxes on oil per barrel. Increasing taxes on state owned oil that oil companies remove to sell wherever is reasonable enough from some points of view, while others believe its unfair to the people to let the transnational oil corporations have the oil at all instead of saving it for future generations to make plastic with. The state government seeks to remedy the wrath of transnational oil by appeasing trans-national mining; the state wants to build a road maybe 50 miles along the Lynn Canal-America largest remaining unspoilt fiord as a Kennisington mine service road, and also as a first stage of a road to connect to Haines and Skagway Alaska to let a hundred people drive several hundred miles each year through Alaska and the Yukon Territory to visit the state capitol at Juneau instead of flying. AL Qa'eda will love having easy land access to the state capitol when it sneaks its agents ashore in Canada just bypassing the customs barrier on the White Pass as intrepid soldiers are apt to do. From Juneau Al Qa'eda can readily catch a direct aircraft or boat to Washington State without a passport required.

Fiords are America's last refuges for wild health and shoreline roads destroy the habitat. Especially in a era of global warming and national decadence regarding national energy independence (alternative fuels and power producing technology should be accentuated positively)it is the pinnacle of irresponsibility to build a 3 million dollar per mile service road to the Kennsington Mine when easy barge marine access is already existent. The state legislature hopes to sneak the road through before a responsible federal administration takes office in 2008 that might halt the wonton rampage of biospheric doom increase, yet the Alaska legislators need have no fear of federal responsibility developing anytime soon. The federal government is irresponsible and fashionably late on disaster response and border enforcement, disingenuous on the costs of outsourcing, environmental damage, global warming and illegal alien worker immigration and its adverse impacts upon the economic and environmental interests of Americans. Transnational corporations like the federal executive branch lackeys because of their mindless servility, and the Alaska State legislature is equally as deficient in creative and responsible conservation and economic thinking.

Transhumanism's Bad Side

Transhumanism is a monstrous mockery of humanism and what it is to be a human being. It is a trend toward the dark side of the force of good and evil. D.N.A. computing using single strands of D.N.A. and fragments of structure for meaning in logic gates of three kinds is already investigated in scientific laboratories. The human genome has evolved integrated into deep forces in nature. Alteration of individual human D.N.A. through xeno-transplantation, new forms of harvesting and morally cannibalizing embryos for the purpose of sustaining existing humans in a process of organ vampirism and embryonic mass murder, genetic designer engineering and sundry other methods of changing the way human beings exist individually will further erode the natural functions and systems integrity of the human genome battered presently by a variety of powerful natural physiological altering manufactured agents. Transhumanism as a way to seek to extend human life will simply transmogrify human life into something else possibly worse than death.

Death, the philosopher John Paul Sartre wrote, is the complete triumph of the other. Many human beings fear death and especially within an atheist and unphilosophical paradigm of personal epistemology believe that death is the end of everything. Christians of course have a different opinion, and the ancient Greek philosophers and especially the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus of the third century understood that life is simply one place that one can be, and that this Universe and life is part of something larger, and better. To attempt to stay here in this universe forever is like attempting to stay in a dream forever, in a dream no longer sustained by a dreamer if separated from God. The reality of existing in a Universe of broken forms would be very, very cold and actually a hell.

Human experience of life and of the Universe seems as it is because human beings are temporal beings with intelligence or self-awareness and awareness of otherness. If a human being lived as long as a neutron star in a low metabolic state consciousness might be of an equivalently slow paradigm with a thought every several billion years some have speculated. Human beings experience this universe as they do because they are a part of it even consuming it as an energy source. The entire human race has co-evolved in a complimentary way through sexual reproduction and in a specific universal physical criterion...to change and disintegrate the nature of things is very, very wrong. While it is a good idea to improve human health the limits of the Universe are real too, to outgrow the Universe will leave no place to go...humanity must be willing to accept the destiny that God has given them as emanations from the One and reconcile themselves unto The One through Jesus Christ.

Athletes with extra arms will get legs upsmanship too in scaling meandering yet meaningful coefficients of social adversity. Genetic engineers will cut and splice out intellectual resistance to transhumanism as the invasion of the body snatchers becomes the supplemental federal bill and steering committee on reduction of national resistance to transhumanism and its deleterious effect upon management of reliance on Muslim fossil fuels, the Bushes and the Clintons.

There isn't a limit to the potential alteration of the human form with modern scientific knowledge evolving as it is, yet isn't it unwise to transform humanity into whatever it can think of in a sort of self-mutilation of humanity and the human genome? People could have extra brains, extra hardware, extra appendages, extra organs-more of anything imaginable really, and nothing would remain of any natural human being or human race that are children of the Universe grown in natural harmony within it. Its rather an all or nothing thing, and something of a philosophical question...should humanity be golden children of the sands of temporality on the beaches of a billion worlds with God as their redeemer or collective giant intelligent fungii never dying and experiencing all intelligent data vicariously with reanimationed sense movies of prior experience substituting for the meaningfulness of anything real. Evidentally to become cells in the long-lived planetary fungus with smarts is a goal for some people of the world today.

Transhumanism brings to the table people using launching platforms for the advantage of death evasion techniques potentially merging into artificial plant forms on the planet Xena. The rage for transhumanism preceded the demotion of Pluto from full planet status and will continue as the human de-engineering of the perfectly evolved human form proceeds to maladapt humanity into its own fragmented image of less than wholeness. The mystical defragmenter of the human genome will not suddenly appear to clear up more space and execute run commands for efficiency when the transhuman monster alterity has set in to devour entirely the genome for-itself and pull the remainder with it into some cosmic sinkhole without change percolating turgidly as an emission from the dregs of time.

Transhumanism instead of wisdom will not bring humanity to full knowledge of The One through Jesus Christ's remedial sacrifice. Instead the broken forms of humanity will become more fragmented and lost in the farthest reaches of doom without the light of God. Whoa!

Presidential Term Limits in Russia, U.S.A. & Pakistan Warped

It seems likely that the two servings per family of a Presidency rule has been set aside for the forseeable future in the the U.S.A. and Pakistan, and next year maybe in Russia too. If President Putin follows American style democracy he will have a son or wife take the job. General Musharif's way of term limit rollback is a bit over-the-top for Russia or the United States. He also needs a relative to carry on the democracy. Haiti and North Korea have also had leaders passed on from father to son, and of course the Marcos family in the Philippenes held on to democratic power that way for a while. Raul Castro has been filling in for his brother Fidel during his sickness.

The time for a resolution for the 2008 Presidential election approaches, the confusion will disappate as to who the rightful heir of the job is-it is time for the Republican Party to bring out the nuclear option and draft the best favorite son candidate availble for the unification of the party and leadership of the United States-former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. really

Jeb Bush is plainly the best qualified candidate with the best record, positions and so forth. Is it right to hold back the office from Jeb Bush because his brother is presently the Lame Duck-in Chief? John Edwards would be the perfect democratic candidate if he were against abortion, and if democrats didn't think that any white North Carolinian poltician isn't secretly a klansman just waiting to repress la raza noir, or not. Jeb Bush has no other competion with any sort of balance since Duncan Hunter isn't doing well. Even environmentalists like Jeb Bush. Have the political growth tanks finished cloning the perfect Ralph Nadar age 50 model yet?

Why the Supersonics Should Fly Away for Good

The Supersonics with Bob Rule, Tom Merchery, Rod Thorn and later Spencer Haywood were a working class team for a working city. The present owner wants to move the team to Oklahoma City, Tulsa or the Red River and maybe beneath an Obama administration to give the people some major league entertainment-good idea. Transnationalists poach and remove for distant trophy cases.

The pro Sports owners expect the taxpayers of Seattle to buy a new sports stadium for them and moving the team is a sort of extortion lever--the public is expected to buy pro sports teams hundreds of millions of dollars and up stadiums for the owners to charge 100 dollar ticket prices in. Let the Supersonic flop go; Boeing's H.Q. has left Seattle, the Supersonic Transport was never built and jets remind too much of the twin towers urban renewal job by Al Qa'eda to ever be a good sports pet name again.

The Supersonics can become a trendy state-of the art team in Oklahoma City or Tulsa with a state of the high tech of politics name like the Oilers. Seattle can go back to being a two sport town and with the extended seasons that will be enough for most of the year.

The Seattle City Council and taxpayers should build a 300 million dollar art and science center instead of a sweat hog super-pork barrel with continuing science and art education. A special music facility for alternative music and alternative energy should be included. Let the sports spoils go to Oklahoma City and the spring open air music festivals to Seattle. Move Sonics move-take off and fly away and let metaphors reign. Saudi Arabia is building one of the worlds largest graduate schools-Seattle must build something besides slop stadiums for the bread and circuses of a declining nation watching instead of participating for themselves. Throw up another spring marathon for Seattle, and a tour of Washington Spring bike race over the north cascades and back to spring street. Keep the space out decadence of spring and summer b-ball in Oklahoma and out of Seattle.

Santa Ana Winds Savage California and The Governagger

The Governagger lacked adequate fire prevention intension for the 2007 California fire season. Not realizing that he wasn’t in Austria anymore, and without the unreality of total recall to help the Governagger seemed to expect a Mary Poppins to fly in in case of fire disaster to fight the flames cresting on Santa Ana’s fell blows from the south. The Governagger forgot that only he can prevent forest fires.
The U.S.A. Today printed a map of the California fire locations this year and in that of the last year-the recurrent locations near population clusters with the broad expanse of the unpopulated sections of forest untouched was indicative of an arson problem. Like the Hurricane Katrina disaster Republican unconcern for disaster a priori was a substantive factor in the loss of billions of dollars of real property and thousands of homes. With the Bush era build the public deficit plan to prevent responsible taxation on transnational corporations adequate fire prevention upgrades in Southern California were improbable. Is human political reason so deficient that wildfires cannot be dampened down to better manageable levels a priori?

At the least the Governagger might have invented pigeon drop fireproof plopping emergency materials techniques to cover threatened homes with airborne fireproof glop, or at least had ground mobile delivered no-burn house covering foam or no-burn bags for homes produced from southern California materials technology laboratories. Treating the forest fire and public health disaster ensuing as an Oktoberfest of natural occurrence isn’t an adequate governance of that portion of the nation-and the Republican just seek profits from disaster policy isn’t an acceptable way to jump start the moribund housing market nor to prevent growing problems caused by illegal immigration to the United States.

Illegal immigration from Mexico swells the population of the American southwest radically. Instead of a stable population growth of a well educated English speaking society the south western states are inundated with millions of Spanish speaking, poorly educated undocumented aliens straining water and wild resources. Nothing can be done to substantively move the interstate public policy toward environmental conservation because of the preference of trans-national corporations that own the Presidency to degrade the quality of the U.S. electorate. The trouble with the corporatist conquest of American politics and broadcast media is that capitalism and the profit motive cannot replace democracy, national self-interest and environmental conservation-only displace them.

Naturally occurring droughts are a part of nature the planetary biota adapts too; what is conformable to natural ecosystem changes are gross human exploitation of natural resources indifferently based on abstract velocity of cash flow without regard to the depletion of resources. Some capitalists unfortunately believe that the profit motive invariable is moved by a hidden anthropomorphic deity that will guide and govern society while everyone does business. Adam Smith's invisible hand' concept was intended to describe the effects of market competition, supply and demand phenomena-not a way to avoid the work of rational government of society. Capitalism will not optimally govern national or local interests; instead it will adapt a posteriori to the way things are and supply what is in demand. If the south west encounters water shortages it will seek to sell more water or lever water from distant regions rather than analyze or correct the cause of the harm to the environment by human misuse of resources.

Capitalism must be controlled by a democracy that conserves its own political sovereignty. Trans-national corporations should run their own business instead of business and government. When corporatism annihilates democracy every public interest is sold out to increase corporate profits and the national democracy withers away as a neo-Marxian transnationalism surges to unify with the trans-national corporate CEO planning as a global tyranny...the American Southwest is just one casualty sprawling on.

Mass migration from Mexico increases population growth and depletion of already tight water resources such as the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers. The aquifers in west Texas are not only over used they are polluted. Good government would build an ecological border zone that would halt illegal immigration and create a green belt along the southern border naturally. Good government would invest in increasing the quality of life in Mexico simultaneously with spending the President's requested 183 billion dollar war budget for the present fiscal year. That money may help defense contractors, yet it also helps the enemies of the United States divert America from improvement of its national security. Without developing policy to support home-produced electrical power for electric cars the U.S.A. will chase after Iraqi oil even if it costs more than a half trillion dollars or more.

The usual atrophy of ecological conservation and egress of political away from conservation toward consumption will drive reasoning publicly such as 'more illegal aliens are needed for fire-fighters' or 'the Northwest has water let's build a pipeline here from it, or from Alaska. The city of Phoenix will rise from the ashes and will decide to cut back on watering their nine million lawns a little and some genius will finally persuade the federal government to borrow more from China to pave the streets with photon absorbing pseudo-gold that would charge electric cars and reflect solar heat back into the atmosphere increasing the local albedo (if it lasts for more than four hours its a good excuse not to go to work).

Consequences of Applied Teleogy

Human culture was advanced in accordance with the purpose of God throughout history…let’s consider some of that…

Prehistoric Greek culture was much like that of the balance of the land north of the Europus; savage. It was only though millennia that settlements allowed the constructions of societies to develop that bring more intense cultural development and social order. The Minoan culture was the first to arrive in Greece and bring a written language and culture concatenated from the ancient civilizations of the south. The Minoan cultures demise was sudden as it's home islands were obliterated except for that of Crete in a Krakatoa like explosion circa 1500 B.C. A local civilization followed-that of Agamemnon and Trojan legends, yet mankind was still led by oppressive royal societies as its best form of governance except in Ur, circa 2000 B.C. God called Abraham out of Babylon and into the desert and Israel in a relationship destined to bring about the major change in human history-a government by a transcendent God of love and respect for mankind by one another, though human original sin would make them fall short of achieving perfection even of democracy.

Classical Greece embodied the contradictions of mankind's relations with itself. A cluster of city states each with a different form of government developed bring them to war incessantly with each other. Athen's and its limited franchise democracy one out and had a league of Delos over-taxing the resources of the other members to pay for things like building the Parthenon. Sparta declared war on Athens after its completion and began the end of classical Greece.
Sparta was the worst of Greek government development with a homosexual butch elite warrior caste annihilating any social order besides war and training for war. Sparta created nothing lasting for posterity except some military victories of dubious necessity. Greek, known by Greeks as Hellas, in Sparta provide slaves named helots to serve of interest of the arrested social order of warriors. It would take the Roman Republic to actualize the society unifying Athenian and Spartan government values to perfect the idea of a Republic.
Servility and savagery each are opposed to democratic individualism…

Tacitus wrote of German society in the first century…

“25. The rest of their slaves have not, like ours, particular employments in the family allotted them. Each is the master of a habitation and household of his own. The lord requires from him a certain quantity of grain, cattle or cloth, as from a tenant; and so far only the subjection of the slave extends.21 Hid domestic offices are performed by his own wife and children. It is usual to scourge a slave, or punish him with chains or hard labor. They are sometimes killed by their masters; not through severity of chastisement, but in the heat of passion, like an enemy; with this difference, that it is done with impunity.22 Freedmen are little superior to slaves; seldom filling any important office in the family; never in the state, except in those tribes which are under regal government.23 There, they rise above the free-born, and even the nobles: in the rest, the subordinate condition of the freedmen is a proof of freedom."

European society needed to be lifted out of it's savage paganism over the next millennium...
Decadent imperialism followed the Roman Republic, yet Christian culture flourished to provide a unity to stand against the invasions of the Omayyad Empire under the false prophet Muhammed. Pope Gregory led a defense against the Omayyad crusades of invasion of Europe that reached Rome, France and the Aegean Islands. Christianity was the motivating cultural element that led Europe out of the pagan re-civilized social structures and into first the imperial structure and then with the reformation and the Dewitt Brothers democratic revolution in Holland into the world's first general government for the masses movement in the form of democracy. While the papacy had become corrupted by worldliness fr a time, it moved Martin Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Knox and others to form independent and general literacy so people could read the Bible in their own language for themselves...God's teleos had drawn mankind out of a planet of the apes and into one moving to democratic individualism.

Christian movement reflected in ensuing mirrored democratic movements against imperial rule from Rome. Christianity was the motive for invention of the printing press by Guttenburg in 1440. Christianity is a living culture founded upon a transcendent faith in Jesus Christ and the grace of God; ancient Greek culture is dead. Ancient Greek culture, or cultures more accurately are one of the great research subjects of archaeology however beginning more than 25,000 years ago with excavations done at the Francthi cave in the neolithic period of hunters moving through the ages to farmers and the emergence of Minoan culture centered at the island of Thera/Santorini before its end with the apocalypse of volcanism giving rise to the legends of Atlantis.

Jesus Christ ended the pagan era of humanity substituting atoning and renewing spiritual faith in the Absolute post-temporal creator of temporality and much more. The Christian culture began with the physical appearance of Jesus Christ on Earth with His birth in Bethlehem circa October, 3 B.C. The laws of God were then written on the hearts and minds of believers as the prophet Jeremiah had related they would be centuries before. Christian culture brought the end of animal sacrifice and misguided beliefs in inanimate objects as gods. The spiritual draft of Jesus Christ was the central cohering element in the rise of western Europe to civilization. From the remarkable writings of the 1st century apostle Paul 4th/5th century Augustine to the 15th century physicist Isaac Newton and contemporary Christians the Christian culture is a remarkable motivating force in human creativity and ingenuity.

Ancient Greek cultures after the end of the neolithic period were known as bronze age cultures. They developed in mainland Greece (Minoan), Turkey (Anatolian) and in some Aegean Sea islands (Cycladic). A transitional culture developed between the late neolithic and bronze ages called today the Korakou culture with simple mostly non-metallic artifacts extent. It has red colors and good pottery and was a decent, modest culture in the beautiful land. The following Minoan culture named for King Minos was a brilliant early culture giving rise to the first European alphabetic scripts discovered...linear A. The following Mycenaean culture was the legendary culture of King Agamemnon and later the heroic age written of at its end by the Homeric poets circa 1100 B.C.

The war with Troy and intercultural conflict helped bring the end of Mycenaean culture. Aeolian, Ionians and Dorian tribes people invaded the weakened culture flowing over the borders of the culture creating an age of darkness lasting nearly four centuries until reformation of an archaic post-Mycenaean civilization in Attica around the year 750 B.C. The city state of Athens would produce some of the greatest creative minds of ancient world history before the Christian era...Parmenides, Heraclitus., Protagoras, Anaximander, Alexander, Sappho, Euripedes, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great etc. With the appearance of the apostle to the gentiles Paul and his oratory at Athens describing the unknown God to the Athenians at the Agora through which Socrates had once walked and talked with his fellow philosophers the end of the decadent and pagan era of Greece after the end of the golden age of 5th and 4th century Athens began. The Christian culture of which Paul bespoke overcame the dominant Roman civilization transforming its natural corruption and downward plunge into a faith that would motivate the Emperor Constantine to refound a Greek Byzantine culture on the Dardanelles bridging the old world and new; bring lands north and south of the Mediterranean into one fold that would survive the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Christianity became the genius of a transcendent universal spirit moving the people of the world into a teleos of God, the end of which cannot be presently known. More than 2000 years old already Christian culture may reach the stars, for the world may pass away but the words of Jesus Christ will last forever.