Forever is a Long Time

That's still one of the great unsolved mysteries, isn't it. How did life evolve from non-life? You've got all those atoms randomly bumping into each other, forming all kinds of chemicals that are not alive. Then, at some point, one or more of those chemical structures becomes a living thing. I can see how one living thing can evolve into other living things, but I don't know how non-living chemicals can evolve into living creatures. Do they even have a theory about that? It seems to me that there are only two ways it could have happened: either accidently or on purpose. If it happened on purpose, then there must have been an intelligent being who made it happen. If it happened by accident, there may or may not have been an intelligent being who decided to let it happen that way. Humans, being somewhat intelligent themselves, assumed, until relatively recently, that there must be Someone out there who is smarter than they are who got the ball rolling. I tend to support that theory myself but, to be fair, it's also quite possible that it happened the other way, by random chance. Neither theory, however, answers the original question, which was how did it happen, not who made it happen.

I don't know what to think about all those alternate universes. Call me "old fashioned", but it seems to me that one universe ought to be enough for anybody. Then again, if there were other universes running parallel to ours, we wouldn't know about them, would we. I know that some people have postulated these other universes with math or something, but that's not the same thing as actually going to one of them and snapping a few photos to show the folks back home.

If you think about it, belief in alternate universes is not that much different from belief in supernatural realms like Heaven and Hell. You have this other plane of existence that is inaccessible to us, but we are asked to believe in it's existence. Well, the difference is that certain individuals claim to have communicated with, or even visited, Heaven but, to my knowledge, nobody claims to have done so with any of the alternate universes. Come to think of it, I don't think anybody has ever made those claims about Hell either. Going to Hell and back is certainly a figure of speech, but I don't think anybody claims to have actually done it. Another difference is that we are supposed to go to Heaven or Hell when we die, but not to an alternate universe. Still, it seems to me that, if you're willing to accept the possible existence of one, you should be willing to accept the possible existence of the other. We can't go there on vacation, we can't phone or email anybody who lives there, we can't see it on Google Earth, but we are expected to believe the testimony of other people that it indeed exists.

Even if neither of these ethereal realms exist today, that doesn't mean they couldn't have existed in the past, or couldn't exist in the future. For it is written: "Of what can it be said, 'See, this is new'? It has all been before, in the ages lost to memory." In that case, though, words like "past" and "future" may not apply. If time itself didn't exist before the Big Bang, can we assume that it won't exist after the Big Bang has petered out? Can there be existence without time, or time without existence? Kind of makes you wonder, doesn't it.

I think lots of animals have leaned how to deal with humans. Dogs and horses immediately come to mind, but I'm not so sure about cats. I think they expect us to deal with them. I'm only talking here about animals that routinely interact with humans. In a manner of speaking,  many wild animals deal with humans too if, by "deal" you mean "coexist in the same habitat". Of course there are some species that have not adapted to living around us. Some of them have become extinct, but others are doing reasonably well in the areas we have reserved for their use, or haven't gotten around to occupying ourselves yet. Even most humans have learned how to get along with other humans. There are exceptions of course, like those ISIS guys. I looked them up on Wiki over the weekend. What a bunch of jerks!

The Whole Shebang

Couple big philosophical problems there Beagles. The mind/body thing being one. When I spoke of soul, I meant whatever makes me alive rather than a religious thing. You know science can pretty much tell you what is going on with you as far as your physical body, and those waves going through the brain, and those chemical reactions going on between the nerve cells, but when you ask why am I alive they can only shrug.

The other thing is that prime mover kind of thing. You can ask what caused the prime mover to exist? Who created God? If He always existed, why did He wait until just six thousand or thirteen billion years or whatever to create the earth? What the Hell was He doing all that time? And later on when all us good guys go to heaven and we are watching God play His harp, what will we do after that?

It’s all the problem of infinity, of dividing something by zero. How can the universe go on forever? And if it doesn’t, what happens outside it, or after it? Those changes in science that you speak of are more the effect of the media glomming on to one theory and later on onto another, because there are lots of those theories as far as the nature of the cosmos, because none of them can be proved or disproved and they are all speculation. It is really not all that different then a roomful of college guys, or maybe military guys, having a bull session late at night, except that the scientists throw more math into it.

The reason I said cosmos is because many of those theories involve many universes, and how can that be since the definition of universe is everything that is? It seems like the universe has been downgraded, so now it is just one of many universes that make up the cosmos. Well then why aren’t there many cosmoses that make up The Whole Shebang? Makes a fellow want to drink, and you know you would get just as good an answer from asking the next drunk on a barstool.

A passenger pigeon may have known everything it needed to know to be a passenger pigeon, but later learned to its dismay that it would also have to know how to deal with humans. And though some animals have done well in our dominion, none of them have really learned how to deal with humans. And you are right, humans are among the animals that have never learned how to deal with humans.  

I Got a Soul, You Got a Soul, All God's Chillin Got a Soul

I wouldn't be surprised if Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion, got some of his ideas from Plato. I understand that he did a lot of reading on his own before that angel came along and told him where he could dig up yet another book. It's been a long time since I talked to those nice Mormon missionaries, but I think you have to be more than just good before you can be put in charge of your own planet. You have to go through several levels of enlightenment and learn a whole bunch of stuff. Some of this stuff can be learned more easily on Earth than it can in Heaven, which is why we were sent here in the first place.

If you believe that all souls are identical, I think you would be closer to the concept that a person has a soul than the concept that a person is a soul. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm sure lots of people believe it that way. Me, I try to keep an open mind about stuff like that, but that's just me.

Your understanding of the Big Bang is somewhat different than mine, but I'm sure you know more about it than I do, so I will take your word for it. The trouble with all these theories is that they keep changing them, and I'm usually a step or two behind the latest update. Still, saying that there was nothing before the Bang seems like a cop out to me, kind of like "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth." The first time a lot of kids hear that, they ask "Where did God come from?" I don't remember hearing a satisfactory answer to that one at Elsdon, but that was along time ago, and a certain amount of memory loss is to be expected at my age.

I hadn't thought of it that way before but, now that I think of it, I think you're right about spoken language not being a construct. It's more like it evolved than it was constructed. If that's true, it seems that language must have evolved in tandem with the human brain. You can think without words, but you can't think of much. It's hard to tell how deeply animals think because they can't tell us about it. Animals communicate with each other, and you can communicate with them yourself if you know how, but their messages are not nearly as complex as ours, which leads us to assume that their thoughts aren't either. Another way of looking at it, though, is that a dog knows everything it needs to know to be a dog, a deer knows everything it needs to know to be a deer, but we humans still don't seem to know everything we need to know to be human.

Have a nice weekend.

no talking before the big bang

Plato believed that, that you existed before you existed. You existed in a world of ideal forms and that’s how when you came across the imperfect forms in this imperfect world, you knew what they were supposed to be.

Myself I always believed, back when I believed, that God had this mountain of egg cartons and everytime somebody new was born he would pluck out a soul and insert it into that baby, so if somebody was born in Sri Lanka just before you were born in Chicago, bam, your soul would go into that Sri Lankan baby, and that other soul, the one just before or after you in that heavenly egg carton, would be born in Chicago. Of course all the souls would be identical so it really wouldn’t matter which soul went into which body.

According to Mormon doctrine when we die, if we are good, we will all get to rule over our own planet, so if you plan on being good, probably better off being a Mormon and ruling a planet than just being one of the crowd watching God play the harp for all eternity.

Yeah probably Obama said that to counter the ISIS assumption that they were doing what god wanted them to do, but how many of those guys are listening to what Obama says? It’s that touchy thing where we want to say we are attacking these muslims, but not all muslims, most of whom we love to pieces.

Nothing was there before the big bang. It wasn’t like there was this big hot massive point of stuff that sat around in the universe awhile and then it exploded. The appearance of that point (and when I say point I mean something without volume) was the beginning of the universe. If you count back in time to the big bang you can’t count past that point because there was no time before that point.

Just to be picky, I am not sure if we can call spoken language a construct of the human mind, because we don’t really construct it, the way we do written language and mathematics, we just do it, the way we eat and drink and sleep. Well we need another person because there is no reason to talk unless you have someone to talk to. At this point I was going to go into the language of twins, where twins invent their own language, but a little wiki snooping has left me confused about all this.

It’s just hard to imagine how we could think without language, because whenever deep thinkers like us do our deep thinking we are really just talking to ourselves. It’s not like we see evidence of deep thinking in other animals, none of which speak. On the other hand, what if you were a really smart cow? What would you do that would be so different than what a dumb cow does?

Well I’ve wandered far afield and I think it’s time I stopped flapping my jaws before any of those evil spirits sneak in and make me want to buy a gun or a framed photo of Ronnie Reagan or something.

The Way I Understand It

Of course I could be wrong, but that's never stopped me before. My understanding of Aristotle's statement is something like the chicken and the egg. The egg precedes the chicken, but the chicken cannot precede the chicken. I don't think that your "me of then and me of now" example applies here. You are you, the you of then and the you of now are the same person. Your parents preceded you, but you did not precede yourself. Another way of saying it might be, "Nothing existed before it existed."

Apparently Aristotle was not a Mormon. They believe in something called "the pre-existence". To understand that, you have to understand the concept that a person is not a body that has a soul, a person is a soul that has a body. In other words, the soul is the real core of the person, the body is just an appendage. Mormons believe that your soul, which means the real you, existed in Heaven before it occupied your body here on Earth. When your body dies, you soul goes back to Heaven from whence it came. Technically, I suppose that's not the same thing as preceding yourself. You are the same person now that you were before, only now you exist on the Earth instead of in Heaven. I don't think you can exist in both places at once, according to Mormon doctrine.

I think, when Obama said "No god ordered this." it was a response to the Islamic terrorist belief that Allah wants them to kill all the infidels (that's us). Funny, during the Crusades, the Christians called the Muslims "infidels". I think the generic term means "unbelievers", so I suppose it could be used either way. Anyway, Obama seems to be saying that the terrorists are mistaken, no god ordered them to kill us. I doubt that he has an inside track into the mind of Allah, so he was probably just expressing his opinion.

My understanding of the Big Bang Theory is that all the matter and/or energy that is present in the universe today was there before the Bang, but it was all compressed into this incredibly dense body of uniform material. All this compression caused a lot of heat, which eventually resulted in the Big Bang, which caused all this stuff to expand outward in every direction. As a result of this expanding process, this uniform stuff differentiated itself into the elements that make up the universe today. Therefore, the Big Bang was not a creation process, it was a transformation process, which makes it consistent with our law of the conservation of matter/energy.

Maybe it's not correct to classify math and logic as languages, but they certainly are constructs of the human mind. These constructs were constructed in the human attempt to understand the nature of nature. I don't know whether or not that makes math and logic purely abstract systems. I would think that the laws of nature would still function if math and logic had never been constructed, but we might not be able to understand them the way we do. Our lack of understanding would certainly not prevent the laws from functioning, they would just be functioning without us understanding them.

Saying "God bless you" when somebody sneezes may be just a figure of speech today, but it is my understanding that the phrase originated during a time when people believed that evil spirits could enter your body when you sneezed. Invoking God's blessing on the sneezer was an attempt to prevent that from happening. Similarly, the habit of covering your mouth when you yawn might prevent evil spirits from entering your body through your mouth while it's open.

ringing in the universe

You know I’m having trouble understanding your opening sentence. Doesn’t everything precede itself? Before the me of now there was the me of then. I am guessing it means that whatever is here now was always here, or that you can’t get something out of nothing. While the phrase has a ring to it, I give it a D for its lack of clarity.

I guess we have that now with the widely accepted principle of the conservancy of matter and energy, although like the sameness of all electrons I have to wonder how they can be so sure. Do they have a real reason or are they just using common sense? But then there is that problem with the big bang, before it there was nothing, and afterwards there was everything, so where did everything come from? More precisely speaking, I think what they say is that you can’t ask what happened before the big bang, the same way you can’t ask what happens when you divide a number by zero.

Math and logic aren’t exactly the same thing. I think math is a subset of logic. About a hundred years ago they tried to put math on a firm logical footing but it never quite worked out, and then along came Godel and blew the whole thing out of the water. Brainy guy that Godel, blew mathematics a whole new asshole, but eventually died of starvation because he thought everybody was poisoning him.

Neither one of them is a language, you can’t say anything about Spot with them. About the time Godel blew mathematics a whole new asshole, there were a bunch of geniuses hanging out in Vienna and they tried to invent a purely logical way of talking, but then discovered that they couldn’t say anything with it.

Do you think we invented logic? It wasn’t just something we discovered as a part of the universe? I rather think the latter. What is more real, the matter floating around the universe or the rules the universe exists by?

What Obama meant was it was a very bad thing. God is just a figure of speech. When you say god bless you after somebody else sneezes, you are not appealing to some supernatural being to do something, you are saying keep your germ laden snot away from me.

I prefer ISIS to ISIL, it has a better ring to it, and you know how I am about rings. Of course this is just something we call them, they don’t even have letters like us in their Arabic script.

We still haven’t decided how to spell Al Qaeda. Both the left and the right use the word reform when what they really mean is change it to the way we like it. It sounds a little better than soak the rich or squeeze the blood out of the poor, though I myself think the former has a better ring than the latter.

"Nothing Precedes Itself"

I think Aristotle said that. It certainly makes sense, so much sense that I wonder why he even had to say it. It's like, duh. Maybe it loses something in the translation like a lot of those old sayings do.

Aren't math and logic merely languages after all? The universe was certainly here before any human language, and it's existence does not depend on our perception of it. Humans probably formulated language to describe their environment to each other: "Look Dick look", said Jane. "See Spot run fast." It likely was some time later that they started asking each other questions like, "Why do you suppose Spot is running so fast?" Logic must have spun off from there: "Spot might be running from something, or he might be running after something. He can't be running from or after himself, because nothing precedes itself."

Well, maybe not, but that's not the point. The point is that we don't understand the universe by logic because the universe itself is logical. Logic is just something that we invented so we could make sense out of the universe for our own convenience. The universe probably doesn't care whether we  understand it or not, unless you want to bring God into the equation.

Your man Obama said something about God on the news this evening, but I don't think he meant God with a capital "G". He was speaking about Islamic terrorism, ISIS in particular, when he said "No god ordered this." If he meant the real God with a capital "G", he should have said "God did not order this." The way he phrased it sounds like he meant "None of the gods ordered this." Where do you suppose he got this information? I don't know how many gods are currently being worshipped by somebody in the world, but I find it hard to believe that Obama is familiar enough with all of them to confidently make a statement like that. Maybe it loses something in the translation. It does seem that politicians speak a different language, or at least a different dialect, than the rest of us. For instance, our word "reform" means "increase" to them, as in "tax reform" or "immigration reform". Then there's ISIS itself. I have heard it called both "ISIS" and "ISIL". How can they put together an international coalition to fight it when they can't even agree about what to call it?

crazy man crazy

Math is certainly abstract in that numbers don’t really exist. You can have three ravens and three monkeys, but you can’t have a three. As long as you use the processes of addition and multiplication and exponentiation you are doing just fine, add two integers, multiply two integers, or take an integer to a higher power, you get an integer, and everything is fine.

It’s when you try to undo those operations that you get in trouble. If I have five ravens and you take away two then I have three and that is fine. But what if you take away five? Well that can’t really happen, but maybe it could sort of. Maybe I could owe you three ravens, that’s debt, something we understand, so then we admit the whole shadowland of negative numbers. They are not so bad, they look like the regular numbers except for that minus sign, and you can add and subtract and multiply them just like regular numbers. That thing where when you subtract a negative number you have to make it a positive, and when you multiply two negative numbers is a little odd, but if you just remember the rule and don’t think about it too much.

And you have to admit zero then, but that doesn’t seem like a problem, he seems like a regular guy, we have all known nothing for all of our lives. But then when you do division things get bad. It’s my contention as a former substitute teacher that kids don’t really begin to hate math until they come to fractions. Too add or subtract them you have to do all this multiplying and when you divide them you have to remember which one to turn upside down, and don’t even get me started with long division.

So it’s a lot more work, but if you are willing to do it and pay attention, everything still works. Until your old pal zero wanders into the lower section of the fraction and all hell breaks loose. Like satan summoned there stands infinity. No, no, the elders say, there is no such thing as infinity. You can think of any number and there is always one greater than that one, but that doesn’t mean there is infinity. Yes it does. Shut up!

There is always that thought that we understand the universe through logic, but what if it just appears that way, the way that the sun appears to circle the earth, and there is some other system that explains everything, but since logic is the only thing we know how could we ever understand anything else?

And what else could there be? Can you imagine a universe where 2 plus 2 equals three?

All the subatomic particles are like abstract entities, the only way we know them is through equations. An electron has mass. A photon is a particle, or a wave, depending on how you look at it, of pure energy.

If ISIS had just killed those guys, that would have been terrible, but that would be that. But because they beheaded them on YouTube we are marching off to war. We are expecting people who don’t like us to do things we want them to do. We are fighting on the side of the hated Assad and the distrusted Iranis, but we don’t admit it. It’s pure nuts. I like to think that my prez is just doing this to keep from getting clobbered in the polls and is intending to weasel his way out somehow. That is the best I can hope for.

You Got That Right!

When we were kids, there was a lot of talk about how the use of tools was what distinguished man from the "lower" animals. Then they discovered that chimps were using tools, so they said that man was the only creature that can make tools. Then it was discovered that chimps and even ravens could make tools too. Nobody has to teach them how, they just figure it out by themselves. Of course no animals can make tools of anywhere near the complexity of man made tools, and that's probably because no animals can communicate with each other with anything close to the complexity of human language. When animals learn from each other, it's mostly a case of "monkey see, monkey do". Of course, people learn that way too, but they can also explain things to each other, and even discuss abstract concepts like math.

Is math really an abstract concept though? It starts out with simple counting and measuring techniques, but then it goes off into the wild blue yonder about things that have no relation whatsoever to the material world. Is math a human invention, or was it always there, waiting to be discovered like fire and gravity? I think that music was always there but, of course, humans have developed it far beyond it's natural expression in bird songs and thunderstorms. Maybe math is like that too. Of course, there is math in music, but you don't have to know the math to produce the music. A bird doesn't need to know math to sing, and neither do we, yet the math is there underlying the whole process, whether or not we recognize it.

I don't know how they came to the conclusion that all electrons are created equal. I don't even know how they discovered electrons in the first place. All the instruments that measure electrons run on electrons themselves, so they are using electrons to measure electrons. But how did they discover and capture their first electron? I seem to remember from my high school physics that there was a whole theory of electricity before anybody knew exactly what an electron was. They still don't know what an electron looks like, do they? Maybe it doesn't look like anything, maybe it's just pure energy or something.

New subject: As little as I watch the news, I can't help but notice that there has been a lot of talk about ISIS lately. They are acting like it's a whole new thing that popped up out of nowhere. I thought it was just another chapter in the continuing saga, but apparently not. It looks like our guys are going to make the same mistakes they have previously made in similar situations: Just a few surgical air strikes, no boots on the ground, except for the couple thousand "advisors" who are already there. Then they want to form a coalition with several other powers that have been proven to be unreliable in the past, some of which have openly declared their dislike of us. This coalition is supposedly going to be led by the United States. What makes them think that any of these guys are going to do what our guys tell them when they don't even obey their own leaders now? If I didn't know any better, I would say that nobody can be that stupid, so they must be screwing up on purpose, but that would be just paranoid.

it's all about language

Empiricism vs rationalism is a whole big thing in philosophy, it’s gone on for years and much has been written about it and you can google it and find pages and pages and different outlooks. And like most philosophy at first you are thinking, wow this is keen and a little later you are thinking zzzzzzzzzzzz.

It’s not much like nature vs nurture, except in the sense that you like you say clearly both sides are involved. You need to have both the inborn genetic stuff and the environmental opportunity to be able to um, write a folk song, likewise you need to use both the information from your senses and from the logic machine in your brain to write that same song.

Math, technically you could devise everything about it sitting in a dark room and never leaving it. Of course you would have to be really really smart and live a really really long time. You could never do physics that way. Without getting into your laboratory with all those whizbang instruments you could never figure out the charge and the mass of an electron. There is no logical reason why an electron has the mass or charge that it does, it just does. It could have had a different charge and a different mass, but then our whole universe would have been different and we wouldn’t have been around to measure it, and some folks think that’s the reason why it has what it has, but that looks like circular reasoning to me.

Another odd thing, every electron has exactly the same weight and the same charge. How do they know this? They surely haven’t measured every electron in the universe. What if they spotted an electron with twice the mass and half the charge of the horde somewhere on the edges of Alpha Centauri? Like finding that one white raven. There’s some information for a new science skeptic like yourself.

I think language is the key to empiricism vs rationalism and nurture vs nature. It was long thought that language was something that you had to be taught, and indeed we do good and bad grammar at school. But this is all written language. We wandered around the hills for thousands of years without one, and even today we have plenty of illiterate people, but we don’t have anybody, excluding severely retarded, that can’t speak.

It’s generally accepted now that spoken language is something inborn. People isolated from other people develop their own language. But they have to have other people to talk to. If they don’t have anybody to talk to by the age of around four you will never be able to speak well. I think you can be taught to use it, the way we can sort of teach chimps sign language, but you never can use it fluently.

Isaac Newton who invented calculus, about the same time as Leibniz, famously said that he got that far because he was standing on the shoulders of giants, and that is how we got to the whizbang world we live in today, because we could write down what we have discovered and pass it on to people who would come later.

Much, I suppose, as the writings of the Beaglesonian Institute will enlighten folks to come.

Garbage In - Garbage Out

I don't think I've ever heard it called  "empiricism versus rationalism", but I may be familiar with the argument. Is it anything like "nature versus nurture"? People have been arguing that one for a long time too, and I don't know why, because the obvious answer is that both are necessary to make us what we are. Mozart was playing the violin at the age of three and composing music by the time he was five. He obviously had a genetic predisposition for musical talent but, if he had not been exposed to music at an early age, it's doubtful that he would have developed his talent so quickly. I don't think it could happen in the real world but, even a Mozart would not likely develop musical skills if he lived his whole life in isolation and was never exposed to music. Even mathematics, the "pure" science, was certainly not developed by a single person working in isolation.

During World War II, it was discovered that Eskimos and Indians had a genetic predisposition for reading a RADAR screen. Nobody knew this previously because none of these guys had previously been exposed to RADAR. The technology was pretty new at the time, and not everybody was able to grasp it. When they started building military bases in the far north, they found that the natives were really good at it, but they still needed a certain amount of training to get them started.

Do you know anything about feral children? You know, like Tarzan, only for real. I have read a little about it, and I once saw a thing on TV, but that was a long time ago. In mythology and fiction these kids were always raised by wolves or apes, but I don't remember the few real life cases saying anything about that. There was a kid in France that they found wandering around and were able to rehabilitate him to certain point, but he reached a ceiling and couldn't progress any further. They didn't know anything about his background, so they couldn't tell if his limitations were inborn or acquired. There is a theory that, with some skills, if you don't learn them by a certain age, you're never going to learn them, but I don't know whether or not that has ever been proven. I don't think it would be possible for a kid to survive infancy without human contact. Being raised by wolves or apes is an interesting concept, but I don't think it's ever been proven to have happened in real life. There have been cases of apes being raised by humans, and we all like to anthropomorphize our dogs and cats but, truth be known, you can only take an animal so far. Then again, that's true of humans too, isn't it. Some are fast learners, some are slow learners, and some individuals can go farther than others, but they all have their limitations.

The point of this ramble is that it is unlikely for any complex thing to have come solely from the logical mind of a single person. You've got to have inputs before you can have outputs and, even then, there is no guarantee that the outputs will be worth a hill of beans.

empiricism vs rationalism, zzzzzzzzzzz

It’s all very well what you say, about being dependent on our senses, or worse yet on somebody else’s senses, or worse even than that, what somebody says are his senses, and worser still than that, what you think he said. Why get out of bed in the morning?

But the coffee is perking (does anybody still perk their coffee? How much cheerier was that sound than the dismal drip, drip, drip, we wake up to in this modern world?), and we get up, and our philosophical engine has not turned on yet, so we have no problem navigating our way into the kitchen and pouring our coffee without worrying for a second whether the chair we are sitting on and the cup we are drinking from really exist.

And if we have any sense we will keep that philosophical engine shut off, until maybe late in the evening, when perhaps after a few beers, we are having a conversation or clickety clacking the keys, we turn it on as sort of a court jester to entertain us until it is time for bed.

And you know this was a big battle in philosophy around the time of the American revolution. The empiricists vs the rationalists. The empiricists thought that all knowledge entered through the senses, while the rationalists thought it was all the logic in our head that we were born with.

You know we know that all ravens are black, well we’re pretty sure we know that, but we can be derailed by spotting a white one. On the other hand we know that the squares of the sides adjacent to the right angle of a triangle equal the square of the hypotenuse for every single right triangle (on a flat plane) imaginable. Of course a right triangle, does not exist in the way that a raven does. Perhaps this is something you could consider when you are lounging around, in a manly manner, in your undies and smoking jacket.

Myself I am more inclined to have my philosophical engine humming in the morning when I am doing completely useless things like writing to you and doing my morning painting. The ideas pop out of my head like popcorn at this time of day, but they are mostly forgotten by lunchtime.

I am a big fan of naps. I have been taking them regularly for thirty years and often they are the highlight of the day. Back in the sad old days when I had to work, my first thought upon awakening and preparing to go into the office was that I would have a nap later that day. These people who brag about how they only sleep like five hours a night and never take a nap, they don’t impress me none. Obviously there is something wrong with them.

As you know I am a cat man, and they may have something to do with it. I know dogs tend to sleep a lot too, but something about the way a cat stretches out and goes to sleep like it has just put in a sixteen hour day of hard labor, when you know the only things it has done since it woke up an hour ago was nibble some kibble and take a crap, it just tends to make a guy sleepy.

Reasonably Certain

The problem with objective realism is that the only way we can observe it is with our senses of perception. Of course reality doesn't depend on perception, but perception, either ours or somebody else's, is all we've got to go by. Therefore, we can never be absolutely certain that something is true, the most we can hope for is to be reasonably certain. When we don't observe something ourselves, but depend on somebody else's observation, we have to decide whether or not to believe him. If two different people report contradictory observations, we have to decide which one to believe, or we can disbelieve both of them, but we can't believe both of them if their assertions are mutually exclusive. Another option would be to decide not to decide, at least for now. We can keep an open mind and wait for additional information, perhaps forever. We may never become totally convinced, especially if we don't care enough about the issue to research it further.

This reminds me of an old poem, which can be sung to the tune of Auld Lang Sine:
"It may be so, I just don't know, it sounds so awfully queer.
We hate like hell to doubt your word, but your bull shit don't go here."

Speaking of queer, I was not aware that homosexuals spend a lot of time lounging around in their underwear and bathrobes. Do they indeed spend more time at this than heterosexuals? If so, what is the source of your information? Have studies been done? If so, were the appropriate protocols followed? Even if the assertion is true, we both know that correlation does not establish cause and effect. Does the homosexuality cause the behavior, does the behavior cause the homosexuality, or are the two phenomenon merely coincidental?

The reason I take my showers in the evening is that some of the things I do in the daytime make me dirty and sweaty, and the things I do at night seldom have this effect.  I seem to remember that there was a time in my life when some of the things I did at night made me dirty and sweaty and, when they did, I would usually take another shower in the morning. Of course that was a long time ago. If I took two showers a day at my age, I would likely develop a dry skin condition.

I know that you usually do your internet stuff in the morning, but I usually do mine in the evening. I can get up in the morning if I have to but, I usually don't anymore because most of the things I do can be just as easily done in the afternoon. If I do get up early for some reason, I generally take a nap in the afternoon. I used to feel guilty about this until I found out that Ronald Reagan routinely took a nap in the afternoon. I then decided that, if it's good enough for the President of the United States, it ought to be good enough for me. Of course, Reagan was pretty old at the time, but so am I now. When my dog Splash was getting on in years, he started spending more and more time sleeping, so maybe that's what you're supposed to do when you're old. Of course, both Reagan and Splash got a little funny in the head towards the end, but that doesn't mean that the extra sleep caused it. Does it?

you put your pants on

I guess they did a lot of things before tv. I think they listened to the radio a lot. I remember being very young and the whole family sitting in front of the radio like it was a tv and listening to some comedy show. But tv was already in the wings. I remember kids in school talking about Uncle Johnny Coons who they were watching when they came home for lunch on that new-fangled device. I felt awfully deprived that we didn’t have one, but a couple years later we did, and it changed life completely. Everybody had their own chair or place on the sofa. The tv listings would have been consulted and the night’s viewing would have been decided on. Somebody would turn it on and there would be a little pinhole of light and then it would come on, and the evening would begin.

I don’t know if radio held that kind of attention, but then there was a time before even radio, and I guess they had barn dances, but you can’t have a barn dance every night.

I don’t know about debates, I don’t remember hearing anything about that, but it does make sense, and I know I have heard that political speeches were a big event. People who may not have even had any political opinions would turn out to see them just for entertainment. Just think we could probably have had our own Uncle Ken and Beagles show, and hawked some snake oil during intermission.

I like the debates, but I never watch the prez’s speeches. Everything he says is leaked out beforehand anyway, so what’s the point?. Remember when they used to have press conferences? I used to like those, but I think they died out after Bill Clinton. Pity.

If somebody is totally into the dogma of Christianity or communism or whatever, there is really no reason to argue or discuss with them. Those systems have approved answers for everything and the guy just repeats them.

I think one thing we agreed on way back when we first started this thing was that there was a physical universe independent of what we might believe, that is there are things like trees and rocks, and there are facts like there is a tree on top of that rock that can’t be disputed. It’s not like whenever two people disagree on facts, both facts are equal, one is true and the other isn’t. This is the source of all knowledge.

If an opinion is based on emotions I am prepared to dismiss it out of hand. A person should be able to see past their emotions (which are illogical), and base their opinion on the facts, just the facts. I find it a little peculiar that a person who lounges around till the wee hours of the evening in his underwear and a bathrobe should be so anti gay. Just sayin.

I was just having a discussion with one of our classmates and made the same point about how email and blogs like this one are superior to phone calls or conversation, for exactly the reason you say, because you have to think before you put your words down instead of just watching your gums flap.

And I am writing this with my pants on, fresh from my morning shower. You guys who shower in the evening, I just don’t know.

Debates Without Pants

I think they used to have debates in the real world before television was invented. I don't know if there were leagues or anything like that. I think people would get together in a hall or theater and watch two of their local geniuses debate, or maybe a visiting genius would come into town and challenge the local champion. I don't know why I think that, maybe I read about it somewhere or saw it in a movie. There must be some reason they have debates in school, most stuff in school is supposed to prepare you for real life, although some of it might prepare you for a life that no longer exists. I seldom watch the political debates on TV, or tune in when the president is addressing the nation on prime time. My hypothetical wife doesn't like stuff like that, and I don't have the patience to sit through the whole thing anyway. If anything important is said, it will likely be covered on the news the next day and, if I want more information, I can always look it up on Wiki.

We have discussed the fact thing before. Of course some sources are more reliable than others, but not everybody agrees which ones they are. There is no point in quoting a source that the other guy doesn't accept. If you are arguing with a religious person, it might be helpful to quote the Bible, but not with an atheist. A Catholic might accept the Pope as an infallible source, but a Protestant would  not. I think it's nice that you and I both accept Wikipedia. Of course it's subject to error, but no more so than a lot of other sources. Everything on there came from somewhere else, but they usually give you their sources so you can check up on them or get more detailed information. If something gets on there without proper authentication, there will be a warning or disclaimer to that effect, usually posted right at the top of the article. Nevertheless, no source is perfect, not even our own observations.

I don't think that opinions are always based on facts, sometimes they are based on emotions, or a mixture of both facts and emotions. An example that comes to mind is that gay thing. There are almost no facts of which I am aware to support either side of the issue. Okay, it has been around since forever. I guess that's a fact, but that doesn't make it right, and it doesn't mean I have to like it.

I don't find it frustrating that you and I can't seem to change each other's minds about anything important, I think it's a miracle that we get along at all. Think about it: the city mouse and the country mouse, the veteran and the draft dodger, the liberal and the reactionary. About the only things we have in common are that we went to school together and we like to talk about the same subjects.

The thing about the pants is not as perverted as it sounds. I usually take my shower either before or after supper and then put on my long johns and bathrobe to lounge around in during the evening. If I was going somewhere or somebody was coming here, I would have to get dressed in proper clothes. All I meant to say was that you can conduct an internet conversation at your own convenience and in the comfort of your own home. I also like the idea that, unlike a live conversation, you get to think about what you want to say before you say it, and edit it if it doesn't come out right. And yes, if I told you or anybody else something that I thought was true, and later found out that it wasn't, I would certainly update you on it at the earliest opportunity.

great debates

Even though I disapproved of arbitrarily choosing a side, I did go in for debate, but I think my poor behavior got my kicked off of Debate Club, the En-Gager too I think. Mrs Kew, not a fan of Ken. But of course there are debate club rules, which exist only in academia, I don’t think there are any professional debate leagues.

And then there are real debates, the only ones I can think of being political debates. I don’t know about them. On the one hand it’s the only time the candidate faces any opposition. There are a few hardball interviewers who will ask hard questions but damn few. And I guess it shows you a little about how the guy can think on his feet.

On the other hand these things are all rehearsed and maybe the winner had better handlers, and just because a guy is a good debater doesn’t necessarily mean he would be a good president. And these guys with the silver tongues are a little suspect because of their power to cloud men’s minds.

I’m going to differ with you on facts and opinions. I don’t think they are the same thing. That the magna carta was signed in 1215 is a fact. That it brought liberty to the folk of England and was a harbinger of democracy to come is an opinion. In the strictest sense we can’t really know anything for absolutely sure, and we usually have to depend on some other source than our own senses for our facts. But not all sources are equal. If I say I read in the Encyclopedia Britannica that the date was 1215, that outweighs somebody who says the guy on the next bar stool, or worse yet, some blogger, told him it was 1214. I think for discussion purposes certain sources can be accepted as factworthy, witness the fact that we generally accept wiki.

I am a stickler on facts. If I think a fact is not true I have to stop everything and examine that. That’s because opinions are based on facts and if the facts are untrue you can come up with any opinion. Opinions are just theories, like science, you gather together some facts and think of a general theory that would fit them. As such, if your opinion is questioned, you can’t just shrug, you have to present your facts.

Thankfully I have never had to sell a truck. I hate that haggling over a price. I guess some people, like you mentioned just do it for fun, and I just can’t imagine.

Does it ever seem frustrating to you that we can’t change each other’s minds about anything? If two reasonable guys like ourselves, who have no particular irons in any fire, can’t come to an agreement what chance is their in the world?

I do think we come to an understanding of how the other guy thinks. And I think there is something in having a discussion which doesn’t get into that name calling that you see so often on the internet makes one feel a little better about humanity. And just because you have to frame your own arguments to make them, it helps hone your reasoning.

Just between you and me, do you ever come up with an argument and then after you’ve written it down, realize that it’s not really true, but then you think the other guy will never notice that and so you leave it in? Me neither, I never do that.

I have been using the term argument in the last two paragraphs when I really should have been using a term like discussion points, just being lazy.

This no pants thing is a little more than I needed to know. I have to assume that you are sitting at a table or something across from your computer.

Debates, Arguments, and Compromises

I never went in for formal debates either, for the same reason you gave. I think that a debate is just a competition to see who is the better arguer. Just because a guy wins a debate doesn't mean that he's right, or that he persuaded anyone to change their opinion, it just means that the judges ruled that he won on points. It's not so easy to determine who won an informal argument. Your opponent might pretend to agree with you just because he became tired of arguing, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you really convinced him, or that he will conduct his affairs any different in the future. Some people who argue are sincerely interested in arriving at the truth of the matter, others are more interested in proving who's the better man, and others just like to argue.

I don't like to argue for it's own sake, but I do like to bring up points and counterpoints that the other guy has omitted for one reason nor another. I used to like to correct people's errors of fact but, over the years, I have become not as sure of my facts as I used to be. People like to call their own pronouncements "facts" and the other guy's pronouncements "opinions" but, truth be known, they're all opinions. Somebody quotes a fact from a source, but he really doesn't know for sure that the source is correct. He believes that that the source is correct, and "belief" is just another word for "opinion". Of course, the preceding statement is just my opinion.

What you said about compromises got me to thinking. You said that you try to get the best deal you can "and still make the deal". Well, what if I don't really want to make the deal? I remember one time when this guy was trying to sell me his pickup truck. My own pickup was pretty worn out, and I was thinking about getting a new one, but this guy's truck was one of those mini pickups, like the Chevy S-10. I didn't want one of those, I wanted another full size pickup like the one I already had. The guy asked me why I needed one that big, and I said that I used mine to haul firewood. He said, "You can haul just as much firewood in my truck as you can in yours, you just have to make more trips." Although I had to admit that statement was correct, I didn't want to have to make more trips to haul the same amount of firewood. Now a lot of guys would have tried to negotiate a price with him, just to see what they could get him down to. They might even have bought the truck if the price was right, hoping to resell it at a profit. I, on the other hand, was not interested in going into the used truck business, I was too busy trying to get my wood up for the season, and I saw no point in negotiating a price on something that I had no intention of buying. I know that a lot of guys like to dicker around like that, kind of like women do when they go window shopping, but I'm not like lot of other guys.

The stuff you and I talk about is different, no money or pickup trucks will ever change hands, and we know it. Some people might think that what we do here is just a waste of time, but I don't. If I wasn't doing this, I would be watching television. That's what I used to do in the evenings before I got a computer. This is more fun than television because it's interactive. They say that you're supposed to exercise your mind when you get old to keep it from withering away. While reading or watching TV can engage your mind, I don't think it's the same thing. Those things are passive, while this is active because you answer me back and I answer you back. I could get the same thing in a real life conversation, but then I'd have to put my pants on and go somewhere in the middle of the night, or somebody would come here and I'd still have to put my pants on. I've got nothing against pants, you understand, it's just that I've been wearing them all day, I've already had my shower, and I'm going to bed pretty soon. Who needs pants at a time like this?

there is no middle

I’ve always looked at it as democracy ideally would be where everybody gets to vote. There are some who think it would be even better if everytime an issue came up instead of wrangling it through congress and wondering if the prez will veto it, everybody just sits at home and pushes a button on their computer. I think this would be really stupid because people are stupid.

I’m not sure what a republic means and I am not going to interrupt my train of thought on wiking it, because even though it may have some formal definition, like socialism, it seems more like one of those words that gets tossed around. I think it is something like you describe it, a democracy but with certain institutions and checks and balances so that anytime the majority change their opinion on anything the country changes all its laws.

You know I got that same charge hurled at me, that I ought to be a lawyer, and probably for the same reason, that I argued all the time. Frankly Beagles, just between you and me, what do people who don’t argue talk about? Of course what we do ideally is really more of a discussion than an argument. An argument is where your whole goal is to win, like in debate club. It always seemed a little odd to me the way they plucked out an issue and then said okay you argue this side and your opponent will argue the other side. What, just like that? Doesn’t every issue have a right side and a wrong side, and if I get the wrong side then aren’t I at a disadvantage?

See a debate, an argument is just a fight, somebody wins, somebody loses, but the issue isn’t necessarily resolved. Maybe at tomorrow night’s debate the losing side will have a smarter arguer and the winning side will have a drunk guy.

What we should be doing is presenting what we believe, putting our arguments forward, and listening to the attacks the other guy makes on our arguments, and analyzing them to see if they still stand and likewise attacking the other guy’s argument and seeing if his arguments are as strong as he thinks he is. Eventually, like my computer, the punched cards will be digested and the numbers crunched and out will pop the correct point of view.

Well but not really. I guess the problem is with that whole fair and balanced concept, nothing is fair and nothing is balanced. And there is no nice middle between us, there is just no man’s land.

You and I go in together on the lottery, and I end up purchasing the ticket and of course it wins. Our agreement was fifty fifty, but I’m thinking I actually bought the ticket, and I have it in my possession. I have an edge here and I am going to use it, and I offer you sixty/forty. No that’s not right, it should be fifty/fifty you declare, and if we choose the middle it will be fifty-five/forty five. But you consult your lawyer and he says no way, Fred saw you agree on the deal and will testify to that, so let’s make it fifty-one/forty-nine. And my lawyer says we can get a witness to testify that Fred was drunk, so offer him fifty-nine/forty one.

Well that’s the difference in our two ideas of compromise. I think there is never really any middle, and if you are going to compromise you get the most you think you can get and still make the deal.

A Democratic Republic

Although the two words are used interchangeably by many people, they mean two different things. A democracy is rule by the majority, and a republic is the rule of law. I have heard arguments about what form of government the Founding Fathers envisioned for this country, and I think they're both right. I don't think that the word "democracy" appears anywhere in the U.S. Constitution, and the word "republic" appears only once or twice. Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that we are supposed to have a democratic republic. A good part of the constitution talks about elections, that's the democratic part. The republic part consists of all the limitations that the constitution puts on the powers of government and the people who run it. Of course, any of it can be changed, but it's not easy to do. The legislative process and, to an even greater degree, the constitutional amendment process, was deliberately designed to be slow and difficult to insure that, before a change is made, people have time to think about it and decide if they really want to do it.

The courts are supposed to be fair and unbiased but, being run by human beings, they don't always live up to that standard. I suppose they do change with the times, although they tend to be a little behind the curve. Federal judges don't have to run for election, but they are appointed by people that do. Once they are appointed, they tend to stay there for awhile, so there's some lag time between the courts and the politicians. Maybe that's a good thing, part of the old concept of "checks and balances".

When I was a kid, lots of people told me that I would make a good lawyer or politician someday. I suppose they said this because I was good with words, but I think it takes more than that to be a lawyer or a politician: the patience to sit through all those boring meetings, and the ability to compromise. We have talked before about compromise, and found that we had two different ideas about what that means, or is supposed to mean. I thought that it should mean the two parties meet in the middle, each getting an equal part of what they wanted, while you thought it should mean one party takes advantage of the other so as to get more than he gives up. Maybe you should have become a politician when you grew up. I have been known to successfully negotiate compromises between two other people but, when I am one of the litigants, my efforts to strike a compromise are rarely successful. I usually find it easier to just take my marbles and go home.

Maybe that's what they should do in the Middle East, everybody just take their marbles and go home.

majority rules

What if, I thought long ago, maybe when I was in high school, we took everybody whose last name ended in A, and shipped them off to the desert or the north pole or someplace, and all the rest of us divvied up their stuff, and that was that? Well clearly we would have the votes.

Well we would never do such a thing, and I’m sure there are some kind of constitutional guarantees, mostly probably in the Bill of Rights. But I guess we could always pass an amendment. If we made slavery illegal by an amendment I guess we could make it legal again by another.

But of course we would never do that. Unless we changed our minds. Look at the gays. We used to hate them. We made laws against them having sex their way, or being teachers, or being in the army, or, of course marrying. But anymore, we rather like them. Outside of their outrageous behavior on those parades, they are generally neat and clean, and they don’t bring those squalling brats on the bus. Then there were those two charming and amusing fellows on the Will and Grace show.

Anymore most of us like them and the majority rules. Well you can see it in the election of gay friendly candidates, but I have to tell you, even I, a gold star liberal, am a little puzzled by the courts. Back in the bad old days the courts didn’t mind all those anti gay laws, but anymore they are turning them over by the slew. The laws are the same, what’s different?

I guess it’s the people, and I guess public opinion matters, but it makes one a little worried. What if public opinion turned the other way, or turned on somebody else?

I’ve been reading a book, The Brethren, about the Burger supreme court during the Nixon days. Most interesting. I had previously thought that a court was like a computer and you fed facts and laws into it like a bunch of punched cards and pushed the button and it crunched the numbers and out came the answer. Not at all, not at all. A lot of politicking going on in those days, a lot of bargaining between the justices, and what was especially surprising to me was how they were always trying to get unanimous decisions.

They certainly don’t do that anymore. It’s kind of like an election, you have your blue judges and your red judges and two or three swing votes in between, and generally all the big decisions are by a one vote margin.

I should really know more about the supreme court, but it would take more than a weekend on wiki.

Well majority rule, whaddaya gonna do? Tough on the oddball, always has been, nobody likes a party pooper. Even a normal guy, if you asked him what he would do if you made him president, I’ll wager most people would throw up their hands in fear and vow never to let that guy get elected. We make a lot of fun of politicians for their pandering and lying and phoniness, but if they didn’t go through those gyrations they would never have a chance of being elected.

You have to compromise, you have to make deals, if you don’t want to do that you might as well move way the hell out to the woods at the edge of the country and find some other oddball to argue with.

The only way Cambodia was allied with China was maybe when Vietnam invaded them and the Chinese might have been for them because they hated the Vietnamese. Which reminds me of our absurd new lurch into the mideast where we are going to be fighting on the side of Assad and Iran, but will pretend that we are not. Crazy man crazy

It Ain't Like it Was

Yes, the union was already there when I hired in. They had previously negotiated a "union shop" agreement with the company, you had to join the union as a condition of employment. Actually, there was a "probationary period" for the first couple of months before you could join. During that time, they could fire you with no questions asked. When your probationary time was up, you joined the union and they couldn't fire you without "due process".

Union shop agreements are now illegal in Michigan, since we have recently become a "right to work" state. It's being tested in the courts, but it's doubtful that it will be overturned since the law was modeled on similar laws that have been in effect for a long time in other states. In a right to work state, you don't have to join a union, and can resign from one that you are already in. You don't have to pay an equivalency fee either. The union is still required to represent you because they are the certified bargaining agent, and you are prohibited from cutting your own deal with the company, which is called "independent bargaining". I don't know if I like that or not. There were times that I wished I could have quit our union, and there were times that I was glad that I hadn't. After working there for ten weeks under the new owners, and without a union, I understood the old slogan: "Any union is better than no union."

I guess the same thing is wrong with unions as with governments, I only have one vote, and have to live with the majority decisions whether or not I voted for them. It wasn't any better when I was a union steward. I only represented the Papermaking Department, and was part of a committee of all the other department stewards, plus two chief stewards, a president and vice president. Majority rule would be easier to take if I was ever in the majority but, for some reason, I seldom am. I don't know what's wrong with people that they fail to see that I'm right and they're all wrong. I tell them, but they don't listen. Stupid people!

I seem to remember that North Vietnam was allied with Russia, and Cambodia was allied with Red China. If that's true, Nixon was barking up the wrong tree if he thought Red China was going to help him pacify Vietnam.

I used to have an internet contact who lived in Taiwan. Actually, the blogs were written by the guy's dog, who was a beagle from the U.K. His owner, which he called "his daddy", had an Irish sounding name, but the blogs sounded liked they were written by someone for whom English was a second language. I asked the dog about that once, and he said "I have two daddies, one is Irish and the other is Taiwanese." It occurred to me that the two guys might be gay partners, but the dog didn't volunteer that information, and I was too polite to ask. I did ask the dog once about the current political status of Taiwan. He told me that the Taiwanese consider themselves an independent sovereign state, but the Chinese believe that Taiwan is a province of China. Neither party has ever made a move to formally enforce their claims. I think it's a Chinese thing called "saving face". Each side pretends that the other side doesn't exist, so they never have to confront each other. My old beagle Splash was like that. He would chase anything that ran away from him but, if the critter turned and faced him, Splash would pretend that he was unaware of the critter's presence. He would look away, or up into the sky, carefully avoiding eye contact.

I looked up some stuff on international trade, and it's way more complicated than I thought. Even thought most trade is between individual companies, the national governments are in it up to their eyeballs. Each country's central bank can do all kinds of things to manipulate the system if they want to. Apparently, when a U.S. company buys something from China, they pay for it with Chinese money. I didn't find anything that tells where they get this Chinese money, since China sells way more stuff to the U.S. than vice versa, but I assume they trade U.S. money for it at their local bank. The banks must get it from the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Reserve must get it either from China or the international currency traders. One way or the other, China must end up holding U.S. dollars, because they loan them back to us at interest. If this is true, my idea to tax U.S. dollars as they leave the country will never pass. While the trade deals might be private sector, the government is heavily involved in getting the money in and out of the country, and the government is certainly not going to tax itself. Back to the drawing board!

solidarity forever! free Taiwan!

What was your experience with the union? I guess it was already there when you began working there. I think you can choose whether to join or not, but if you don’t you still have to pay the equivalent of union dues. I think you said that at one time you were some kind of union official or something, so what was that all about?

The closest I ever got to a union was when I was substitute teaching and all the regular teachers were union. You wouldn’t notice it much, but sometimes I would end up attending a teacher’s meeting, I assume because they didn’t know what else to do with me, and at some point the union steward (yes that’s the word I was looking for earlier) would point out this and that. Nobody broke into solidarity forever or anything, in fact a few looked a little annoyed, but nobody argued with the steward.

Then a few years back we had a big teacher’s strike. Shut it down for maybe a couple weeks at the beginning of the school year, all the teachers were camped out in front of the schools with signs asking drivers to honk if they supported the strike, and there were a lot of honks. The teachers and their supporters all wore red. I had not been subbing for a few years, but I walked out to the schools where I had subbed and urged them on. I think I said something like you guys go, or something equally inspiring.

And then they won the strike. A lot of their support may have come from the fact that most people hate our mayor Rahm. Myself, I voted for the guy, but I have come to hate him too.

I read a book lately about the Nixon visit to China. Mao was almost comatose when it happened, and Nixon was just his plain old self traveling with that reprobate Kissinger who was making fun of him at every turn. The idea was twofold, to fuck with the Russkies, and to see if they would put the arm on their Vietnamese ‘allies.’ The first part worked out well enough, but Red China wasn’t interested in helping us out of our Vietnam problem, and anyway the Vietnamese hated Red China more than they hated us.

Taiwan, I had to wiki it to make sure it was still there without red paint being poured all over it, but there it is, still sitting there offshore, though you never hear about it anymore. Come to think of it, wasn’t it a big deal with the Birchers? Didn’t they have some wild theory that the US was somehow keeping it from attacking China to topple the commies? There used to be this very conservative magazine in the student union bookstore, American Opinion, that I used to sneak peeks at back in my hippie days, and I believe that was one of their theories.

I really don’t know that we have ever invested much money in Red China, they are touchy about foreigners being involved in their economy. Of course, as we have discussed ad nauseam lately life isn’t fair, but isn’t selling your goods at lower prices fair market practice? Is it fair when the Cardinals beat the Cubs?

Dogs, Unions, and Red China

I think I confused you by explaining the origin of "dog in a manger". It's just a figure of speech that is used to describe somebody who doesn't want what you've got, but he doesn't want you to have it either, kind of the way I am about gay marriage. As you pointed out, two gays getting married doesn't materially affect me, I just don't like the idea of it. Truth be known, there is very little I can do to prevent it, but that doesn't mean I have to approve of it. The Cheboygan dogs resented that we made more money than they did yet, when they had the chance to hire in at the mill, they chose not to. They couldn't do anything about it but, if they could have, they would have rather reduced our wages than increased theirs. At least that's the impression you got from talking to them about it.

The oldest part of our paper mill has been there for well over a hundred years. Several additions have been added, and substantial remodeling has been done over the years, but the original structure is still there and in use. The mill had been shut down for some time, the last owners having gone bankrupt, when Charmin Paper Products bought and reopened it in 1960. Shortly after that, Procter & Gamble bought Charmin Paper Products, and our little plant was included in the deal. The union was organized while Charmin still had it, and continued after P&G bought the place. Sometimes, when a plant is sold, the new owners recognize the union and sometimes they don't. They are not required by law to recognize the union or retain any of the employees of the previous owners, but sometimes it's negotiated into the sales agreement that they do so. I don't know exactly how it went down at our plant. If the new owners don't recognize the union, the employees could always reorganize and start all over again. The organization of a plant is frequently a tumultuous event, with hard feelings on both sides lasting for years afterward, so maybe P&G agreed so as to avoid that hassle.

Most labor unions in the United States are organized into a three tiered structure. First you have the local chapter, commonly referred to as the "the local". Almost all locals are sponsored by a parent organization, commonly referred to as "the international". Almost all the internationals in this country are affiliated with an umbrella organization called "The AFL-CIO", which was formed when the American Federation of Labor merged with the Congress of Industrial Organization. The formal title of our union reflected this: "The International Paper Workers Union, Local 126, AFL-CIO, CLC" The CLC stands for "Canadian Labor Congress" which, I suppose is the Canadian equivalent of the AFL-CIO. The organization and operation of labor unions is closely regulated by The National Labor Relations Board, commonly referred to as "The Labor Board".

When a bunch of guys want to unionize their plant, they usually contact somebody from one of the internationals, and they send out people called "organizers" to help them with the process. In theory, they could skip this step and form an "independent local", but that seldom happens. Legally, you can't be fired for trying to organize a union, but it happens, and the organizers from the international know ways to prevent this, and can file a complaint with the Labor Board if it happens. The organizers, both local and international, circulate among the employees and try to persuade them to sign cards, which are actually applications for union membership. When a certain percentage (the exact number of which I have forgotten) of the employees have signed cards, the organizers petition the Labor Board to call an election. The Labor board sends out people to conduct the election, which is by secret ballot. If a majority of the employees vote for the union, the Labor Board certifies that union as the legitimate bargaining agent for all the employees in the plant, or subgroup thereof, whether they voted for the union or not. At this point, the company is supposed to recognize the union and negotiate a contract with them. Not all companies are eager to do this, and there are various methods, both legal and illegal, that they can use to stall the process, sometimes for years. If, at some point, the employees change their mind and want to get rid of their union, they can file a decertification petition with the Labor Board, which will conduct another election.

Say what you want about Red China, but I maintain that they wouldn't be where they are today if Richard Nixon hadn't kissed up to them and sold our ally Taiwan down the river. Of course, a lot of other things have happened since then, but that was the watershed event that got the ball rolling. While the Chinese could have initiated many changes on their own, and probably did, they still wouldn't be where they are today without the U.S. dollars that have been pouring into their country for the last couple of decades. Maybe that's not such a bad thing but, as I have said before, I would like to see some of those dollars repatriated, and not by borrowing them. International trade is supposed to be a two way street, but this one has way more eastbound lanes than west bound lanes in operation. Does that seem fair to you?

The mill comes to Cheboygan

I don’t see how the anti-mill people were like the dogs in the manger in that they didn’t keep the rest of you from the soft hay of those fat mill paychecks. The whole thing reminds me of the industrial revolution coming to town. Before that I suppose they were the lords and ladies of the village, they had their names, their forebears, their social places. It doesn’t seem like there were a lot of jobs to hand out, and maybe it was a small pond, but they were the biggest frogs in it.

And then along came the mill and everything was turned topsy turvy. At one point in Champaign they built an atomic energy plant sixty miles down the road and it seemed like all the bums were getting construction jobs and walking around with those fat paychecks.

Maybe it looked a little like socialism to those manger dogs. They all had their own little businesses or farms or whatever that had been built up over a long time. And suddenly in comes this mill and people who had never built up anything were making big bucks at the mill. Of course it wasn’t their bucks, and it was probably a good thing for them to be living among people who were making money and spending it in their businesses, but I guess they didn’t have the stature they once had and those clerks that they had once ordered around could now just up and get a job at the mill.

There is maybe another way to look at it. Before the mill these people plied their trades, maybe took pride in doing what they did, not beholden to anything but the vagaries of the business cycle. But at the plant they were just hands for hire. They did whatever their bosses told them to do, and when the bosses told them they wanted them to do something else they did that, and anytime the bosses decided to can them they were out.

Or maybe not, you had that union. What was the deal with the union? It sounds like there wasn’t one originally. Did you guys form your own, or did some other union come in and say, how would you guys like to join?

I don’t think that America gets as much credit for making the Red Chinese (that phrase, archaic as it is, has a certain ring to it) the power that they have become, I think they did it themselves. I guess we could debate on that.  

Dog In a Manger

I remember three preachers at Elsdon, the lady you mentioned, her predecessor Fred Tozer, and her successor Alan Anderson. Rev. Tozer was a kindly laid back preacher and everybody liked him. Rev. Schact was uptight and unpopular. Rev. Anderson was fresh out of college. The old people thought that he was too young to be a preacher and never gave him a chance. The young people liked him, probably because he wasn't a whole lot older than we were and seemed to understand our problems.

I guess I didn't make my "dog in a manger" story very clear. Let's try again: My paper mill colleagues were not the dogs, they were the cattle trying to eat out of the manger. The dogs were the Cheboyganites who didn't work at the mill and resented that we made more money than they did. The reason they were the dogs was that many of them had the same chance to hire in when we did, but declined to do so for one reason or another. They didn't want to work there, or organize unions of their own, they seemed content to work for low wages and thought there was something wrong with us because we weren't. This is kind of hard to understand, but it makes a little more sense when you consider it from the perspective of the "Who do you think you are?" syndrome. Most of these people's families had lived in Cheboygan for several generations. They lived next door to each other, went to school together, and married each other's sisters. There was kind of a social hierarchy based on family names, some families were more highly esteemed than others. Money had something to do with it, but it was more a matter of who you were than it was about how much money you had. I guess they expected everybody to "stay in their place", or something like that. I remember one guy who was a college educated entomologist ( an expert on insects.) He quit his job at a large Christmas tree farm and became an hourly worker at the mill because their entry level jobs paid more than he was ever likely to make in his chosen field, at least in this town. Now if he had stayed at the tree farm and complained all his life that the paper mill workers made more money than he did, he would have been a dog in a manger.

There is a popular myth that says, the harder you work, the more money you will make. If that were true, the guy who shovels coal down in the mine would make more money than the CEO of the mining company. Truth is, you are not paid for how hard you work, you are paid for the value you contribute to your employer's profits, and also how hard it would be to replace you if you quit. I'm sure the people in Red China, on average, work harder than we do, but they were doing that for centuries and it never got them anywhere. The main reason their condition improved is they came in out of the rice paddies and went to work making stuff that Americans wanted to buy. They wouldn't have had this opportunity if American businessmen hadn't contracted with the Chinese government to build factories and start businesses.

Although I am no fan of Chinese Communism, I don't blame any of the people involved in all this for doing what's in their own best financial interest. When I talk about the money they got from us, I don't mean Chinese money, I mean U.S. dollars. When our government borrows money from the Chinese government, it's denominated in dollars, not yuan or whatever it is they call their money. Back in the days of the gold standard, trade deficits were made up by transferring gold from one country to another, at least on paper. I'm not sure how they handle it nowadays, maybe I'll look it up this weekend. One way or another, though, China has way more of our money than we have of theirs, and I'm looking for some way to repatriate some of those U.S. dollars. Maybe we shouldn't be using our dollars to buy stuff from China in the first place, maybe we should pay them in scrip or something. Let me think about that and I'll get back to you.

wild and wacky people of Cheboygan

I thought I knew what a manger was, just as the preachers had taught us at Elsdon, a place for baby Jesus. But I guess if I had given it any thought, which I did not, I would have wondered since Jesus only ended up in that one barn, what did everybody else have a manger for? When I was speaking of the preacher it suddenly occurred to me that the only preacher there that I remember is that woman who had a name like Schadt, and her only because she was a woman and had a name like mine. You were a little more devout than me I think, do you remember any others?

I think that’s true, one generation fights and achieves something, and the next generation takes it for granted. I think that’s one reason Russian communism fell, one generation fought the heroic revolution, the next fought off those awful krauts, and the next one just wanted to wear those new blue jeans.

I don’t understand the attitude of your resentful Cheboyganers. You guys weren’t lying in the hay, you were eating the hay, and though I expect cattle are afraid of dogs, what kept the other Cheboyganers from jumping into the manger with you? Thinking about those cattle. Would they ever get so hungry that they would just push that dog out of the manger? When a wild carnivore gets hungry it can be pretty aggressive, I wonder if the same is true for herbivores.

Anyway what is up with Cheboygan? Full of people who resent people who work a steady job, or full of people who want something just so that somebody else can’t have it? Were you guys in the plant driving your streak of lightning cars along the streets of Cheboygan and flashing your fat paychecks at the starving masses huddled at the curbside, and then setting a match to them so that nobody else could have the money? I don’t get you guys.

I think the Red Chinese worked harder than us for their money, especially those fat Cheboyganers lolling around in the plant discussing whether they wanted fatter paychecks or more vacations instead of being knee deep in rice paddies or working in some unimaginable sweat shop. Does a person who worked harder for something deserve it more? It seems like they do, but I don’t know why.

I am a little unclear about how you think My point is that most of that money originated in the United States, I assume you mean Red China’s current money, but it’s not like something we had first, so we deserve it more. They get our money two ways. They work hard and makes stuff that we want to buy and they save their money, so that they can buy the bonds we have to issue because we can’t live within our means. We are the shiftless brother in law.

I think you are saying that if somebody sells you something for five bucks and later on you borrow that five bucks from them, you really shouldn’t have to pay them back because it was your money before you bought something from them. Oh you Cheboyganers.

And now look what my pres is doing. Once again the American tippy toe is poking into the middle eastern morass. Oh but now we have a coalition, but the closest that coalition gets to the middle east is Turkey, and you know how those coalitions go, it’s basically the US, and we know how the middle eastern people love the US.

What's It Good For?

I think the world needs both the idealists and the pragmatists, one thinks up the ideas and the other either makes them work or proves that they won't work. Sometimes, though, it isn't so much that an idea won't work, it's just that nobody thinks that it's worth the effort to put it into practice. Before anybody does anything, they first have to want to do it. Many things are interesting to contemplate, but, if nobody wants to do it, it won't get done. Then again, sometimes it's a negative motivation, you do it to evade the negative consequences of not doing it. It's like they used to tell us in the army: "We can't make you do it, but we can damn sure make you wish you did."

I think another reason the labor union movement lost a lot of momentum in our lifetimes was that all the significant gains had already been made by our predecessors. Our generation inherited all this and took it for granted. We had the vague idea that we should be trying to get more, but we couldn't agree about what specifically to try to get. Some people wanted more money, some wanted better insurance, some wanted more vacation and holiday time, and some wanted better working conditions. My paper mill colleagues didn't seem very concerned about the starving masses who still hadn't organized unions. The starving masses in Cheboygan were generally resentful of us anyway. Instead of striving to catch up with us, they wished they could bring us down to their level. There is even a term for that in our local dialect: "dog in a manger". Being a city slicker, you may not know that a manger, in addition to being a place to lay the Baby Jesus, is a box where you put hay for livestock to eat. Also, dogs like to sleep in them because of the soft warm hay. When a dog is sleeping in a manger, it prevents the livestock from eating the hay. The dog has no interest in eating the hay himself, he just won't let the other animals eat it. Therefore, a dog in a manger is a person who doesn't want something for himself, but he doesn't want anybody else to have it either. Cheboygan is full of people like that.

I know that we can't tax Red China, I just wish we could. Sure they earned their money, but so did we. If we have to pay income tax, they should have to pay income tax. Well, they probably already pay income tax to their own government, but that government already owns everything in the country. My point is that most of that money originated in the United States, and there should be a way to repatriate some of it. For about five years our central bank has been cranking out 85 billion new dollars a month. There has been some talk of them "tapering off", so I don't know what the current amount is. Where did all that money go? The economy has been slowly improving, but that might have happened anyway. Meanwhile, our government has been borrowing money from Red China, money that they wouldn't have had if we hadn't given it to them. Does that seem fair to you?

Another place that money has been going, is to Mexico and other Central American countries. The link you gave me talked about it. I don't know if illegal immigrants are good for our economy or not, but they sure are good for their own economies back home.

Okay, here's another idea that just occurred to me: How about an export tax on U.S. dollars? Ten cents of every dollar that leaves the country, for whatever reason, gets kicked back to the U.S. Treasury. They could even make it revenue neutral by paying a ten cent rebate on every dollar that comes back into the country. We can argue later about how to fairly distribute this new found wealth, but first we have to get it back into the United States where it belongs.

idealists

Don’t you think that sometimes idealists are, well, full of crap. I mean we kind of admire them, they seem so pure and all, and at first glance their ideas are sparkly. But it seems they are more interested in the purity of their ideas, and so disdainful of the rough ways of man, that they are just not going to get anything done.

I know I’ve told you that in some of my advanced math classes, there would come a point when the prof would be explaining some abstruse chain of logic and some student would raise his hand and ask, So what? What good is all this stuff? What can we do with it? And the prof would set down his chalk, and stare at the guy, and with thinly concealed disgust ask, You’re an engineer aren’t you? And the student would be all like, Why yes I am. And the prof would raise his hands as if in despair of ever teaching this lout anything, and the half of the class that was math majors would all laugh, and the half of the class that was engineers would scratch their heads.

I was a math major, not a very good one, most of the time I didn’t know what was going on. I survived on the kindness of professors, more likely their disinterest in grading. Sometimes they would give the whole class A’s, because they couldn’t be bothered wasting their time by judging the rough lot of students. I sided with the profs, because those engineers, all they did was make gadgets, generally loud and annoying. I would have been happier on some Grecian Glen watching Pythagoras sketch his pure ideas in the sand. Unless it got too hot. Then I would have liked to have been in an air conditioned room.

And I guess I like the union idealists better than the pragmatic ones. The liberal union guys look at the world and the unfair distribution of wealth (remember that) and they think that something has to be done about it, and maybe the place to start is the paper mill. They will help those poor oppressed folk to make a buck more an hour and put an extra slice of bread on the table of their children. And from there they will go to other mills and help those oppressed folk, and on and on until everything is fair and dandy.

But those plant guys who may have nodded through the flowery speeches of the liberals at the union hall, once they get that extra buck, they have kind of lost any interest they may have had in making everything fair and dandy, and they don’t want to support those strangers at that other mill halfway across the state and those union dues seem to awfully high, and as for making everything fair and dandy, well that sort of sounds like commie talk.

Don’t those Red Chinese earn the money they get from us, by working harder and saving more, all fair and square? Or is your argument that they are them and we are us? I don’t think you can tax another country.

I think they take polls and extrapolate, maybe estimate how many come over and how many get caught. Wiki has an article on it of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigrant_population_of_the_United_States 

12 million seems to be the generally accepted number. And two reasons why even the tea party doesn’t talk about shipping them back is that it would be really hard and expensive, and it would ruin or economy even more.