Potential Concerns Of V-W2:
Tending towards full description or definition of a problem, its status as “problem” transposes towards “problem resolved.” To fully understand a question is to comprehend its answer.
OUTLINE –Regarding Stability, Sustainability, and Surpass-ability of Modern Civilization:
I. PAST --- Historical STABILITY:
A. Security (Borders, Patriotism, Language, National Identification)
B. Structure (Energy, Utility Grids, Roads and Dikes, Infrastructure, Satellite Signals)
II. PRESENT --- Present SUSTAINABILITY:
A. Survival (Health, Education, Welfare, Environmental Challenges)
B. Solvency (Jobs, Markets, Business, Productivity, Investment)
C. Sociability (Family, Charity, Church)
D. Service (Environment, Defense, Arms)
E. Subordination (Prisons, Police, Lawmaking, Governmental Organization, Global Relations)
III. FUTURE --- Inspirational SURPASSABILITY:
A. Sacrifice and Spiritualism (Addictions, Self Reliance, Practicing Victimization and Grievance, Privacy)
B. Sport, Song, Serenity, Science (Entertainment, Pursuit of Happiness, Responsible Eugenics and Robotics, Space and Oceanic Exploration, Transcendence)
SUB-OUTLINE:
I. PAST --- Historical STABILITY:
A. Security (Borders, Prisons, Patriotism, Language, National Identification)
1. How should borders be rendered less porous to illegal immigrants, criminals, dope dealers, and terrorists?
2. How should terrorists be beaten effectively, without adopting terrorism?
3. How should military intelligence be gathered, without training agents for turning?
4. How should security be improved by better monitoring or decapitating of gangs?
5. How should morals be inculcated or conditioned, so as to lessen costs of imprisonment and rehabilitation?
6. How should patriotism be better inculcated?
B. Structure (Energy, Utility Grids, Roads and Dikes, Infrastructure, Satellite Signals)
1. How should infrastructure be better secured against vandals, criminals, and enemies?
II. PRESENT --- Present SUSTAINABILITY:
A. Survival (Health, Education, Welfare, Environmental Challenges)
1. How may we achieve decent universal health care?
B. Solvency (Jobs, Markets, Business, Productivity, Investment)
1. How may a Consumption Tax best be substituted for our Income Tax?
2. By what governmental incentives or market regulations should niche filling opportunities for corrupting bargains be counteracted or reduced?
3. How can quality leaders be inspired without having their attention diverted to golden parachutes?
C. Sociability (Family, Charity, Church)
1. How should children be raised and protected?
2. How should polyamory be regulated, recognized, or celebrated?
3. How should gangs, gangsta’ rap, and media glorification of ever more potent hedonistic addictions be reduced?
4. How should civic organizations be encouraged?
5. How should churches be taxed?
D. Service (Environment, Government, Defense, Arms)
1. How should government be limited, so that we are not reduced to having the government pretend to pay us as we pretend to work?
2. How should population growth be better managed?
3. What should be inculcated in respect of responsible civic involvement and/or shifting alliances among policy interests?
4. How can our governance be better defended against overpowering accumulations of aristocratic wealth?
5. How may class warfare (cynical earmark payoffs, poverty pimping, and slogan campaigning) devolved in respect of perpetual campaigning between only two competing political parties be reduced?
6. How can our government become less of a parliament of whores and dunces? (Presently, we have Moe, Larry and Curly chasing each other around the halls of governance while the rest of the country, getting the leadership it deserves, wonders why no great society seems to last very long.)
7. How should we defend against invitations to treason extended to governmental-retiree, revolving door, cashing-in, international lobbyists?
8. How may a more moderate political party ("Red Ass Moderates") gain traction?
9. How can the better candidates be recruited?
10. How should access to automatically repeating arms, guns, and even WMD be regulated and/or limited?
E. Subordination (Prisons, Police, Lawmaking, Governmental Organization, Global Relations)
1. How should we deflate democratic delusions that problems are resolved merely by organizing to enact ever more laws, without need of military, police, or spiritual inspiration or actual service?
2. How should business interests be channeled in respect of national or democratic interests?
3. How should America use tariffs to guide trade policies that are reasonably fair and free?
4. How should global businesses be regulated in interacting among incompatible countries and cultures, so that boundaries are not exposed, as jugulars to predators?
III. FUTURE --- Inspirational SURPASSABILITY:
A. Sacrifice and Spiritualism (Addictions, Self Reliance, Practicing Victimization and Grievance, Privacy)
1. How should academics and teachers lead voters to become less ignorant (and vice-versa)?
2. How should Congress become less impotent for establishing an energy policy adequate to motivate Americans to become less dependent upon OPEC oil and foreign thugs?
3. How should government incentive the production and feasibility of electric vehicles?
4. How can Congress become less afraid to tell voters a truth: That fossil fuels should be taxed high enough to better represent hidden social costs and to encourage development of alternatives?
5. How should voters be lead to become more able to handle the truth?
6. How can society better discredit or at least de-glorify simplistic Marxist notions that still hold sway in our educational system?
7. How may the cost to Americans of providing protection for security lax Europeans be intelligently reduced?
8. How may fascist organizations be stripped of freedom to pretend to be religions?
9. How should scientists and spiritualists be lead not to overstep NOMA?
10. What should be taught concerning Philosophy of the Good; and how far separate should such teaching be kept apart from public schools?
B. Sport, Song, Serenity, Science (Entertainment, Pursuit of Happiness, Responsible Eugenics and Robotics, Space and Oceanic Exploration, Transcendence)
1. How may media be better encouraged not to indulge the lowest common denominator of popular culture for leading sociopolitical voting, buying, interests, and passions?
2. In what should responsible eugenics and responsible robotics consist?
3. How should we cooperate to seek stable and manageable populations, demographics, economies, environments, and fulfillments?
Regarding IIb (Solvency), see:
ReplyDeletehttp://dlanor-renrag.blogspot.com/2008/04/evolution-of-neo-walden.html
Hubristic Warming:
ReplyDeleteRegarding Al Gore’s science adviser, Dr. James E. Hansen, and Global Warming, see:
http://www.eesi.org/publications/Fact%20Sheets/EC_Fact_Sheets/hansen_climate_testimony_06.pdf
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen.
Hansen complains of DISTORTION imposed by the Bush administration:
“There is a short clip in the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth that shows Hansen being questioned by Al Gore on May 8, 1989, at what appears to be a Congress meeting. Gore criticizes Hansen for apparently contradicting himself in a written testimony on global warming. At that point, Hansen reveals that the last paragraph in the testimony was not written by him, but added by someone else.”
Hansen: The real deal is this: “the ‘royalty’ controlling the court, the ones with the power, the ones with the ability to make a difference, with the ability to change our course, the ones who will live in infamy if we pass the tipping points, are the captains of industry, CEOs in fossil fuel companies such as EXXON/Mobil, automobile manufacturers, utilities, all of the leaders who have placed short-term profit above the fate of the planet and the well-being of our children."
Issa: Congressman Darrell Issa questioned Hansen's motivations in criticising the Bush administration, noting that Hansen supported 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and also received a $250,000 Heinz Environment Award from the Heinz Foundation, run by Kerry's wife, in 2001.
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I appreciate concern that we know little about effects that will likely befall us, given rapid increases in population, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and methane. (I would especially prefer that more be done to control population growth.)
Yet, I have not appreciated the “science” in drawing a clear connection between increasing carbon dioxide and global warming. Has not nature moderated previous cycles of high levels of carbon dioxide? If so, what were the effects then? Did changing temperatures follow (or only precede) previous increases in levels of carbon dioxide?
Have previous temperature changes been more closely associated with changes in the sun’s spots and earth’s rotation (in elliptic quality, polar wobble, and path with solar system through arms of Milky Way)?
Does increased carbon dioxide tend naturally to increase oceanic plant growth, leading to re-mediation of such increases long before any (man-made) triggering of global warming periods or ice ages?
Having only skimmed some of Dr. James E. Hansen’s writings about global warming, I have not yet noticed an explication of scientific work that rigorously shows increased carbon dioxide as being a primary cause of global temperature changes.
Am I missing something, or are vested interests pulling a fast one? IOW, are Hansen, et al, entertaining their own brand of DISTORTION about the present quality of scientific information?
Both political parties have stretched credibility beyond trust. They treat us like children who need to be persuaded with lies, because science has become so complex and reliable while our society has grown too soft and too dumb to be able to handle the truth. Sadly enough, our society does seem to have grown mentally soft.
Apart from global warming, I would like to see what thought has been given to other concerns on account of increasing carbon dioxide. Yet, pending clearer explication in science, does the increase in carbon dioxide remain something that should better be moderated by nature than by government?
Has any environmental model (for asserting increased carbon dioxide as a trigger of disaster) yet been shown to be rigorously consistent with data crunching by super-computers? If not, is Hansen’s mind a sufficiently superior substitute, so that we should believe what he says is so?
Should legislators and scientists be exalted, as our newest twin gods to be “believed in,” even for stuff that Mark Twain would be prone to say “just ain’t so”?
There may come a time when sociopolitical decisions derivative of complex social modeling should presumptively be entrusted to governmental scientists, rather than to elected political managers. However, before such time, should not scientists first provide a model for rigorously crunching and weighing ALL socio-environmental effects, including political and economic effects?
BTW: Can “science” say anything about threat to the environment upon entrusting changes in sociopolitical policies to legislators and scientists with hubris enough to believe that government should be a radically proactive substitute for natural and market forces, even when based only on vague hopes, feelings, and initial stages of scientific inquiry (or greedy postulation)? After all, the road to hell is paved with (the hubris of) good intentions.
Bottom line: Levels of carbon dioxide should be monitored, data should be collected and crunched, leadership should be exerted towards reducing levels of population and carbon dioxide, dubious fear mongering should be avoided, and the answer to every complex concern is not more governmental laws. That is just not the sort of change we can believe in.
Re: IIIB -- Responsible Robotics:
ReplyDeleteRe: Free Will: “Of God, Will is primary power; physics is secondary power, emerging only in respect of Will-To-Math”
Brain-Machine Interface Technology:
See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/science/29brain.html?_r=2&scp=2&sq=monkey&st=nyt&oref=slogin&oref=slogin:
“the monkeys’ brains seem to have adopted the mechanical appendage as their own”
Suppose a human experimenter and assistants design a machine for helping a monkey with no arms feed himself marshmallows with a machine which the monkey controls with his mind, through signals sent through connecting electrodes.
As the monkey is stimulated by seeing the experimenter put a marshmallow in the machine, is the monkey’s choice to send a mental signal to feed himself using the machine random (based on cycles of hunger), chosen (based on wishing to experiment with new powers), determined (based on S-R conditioning imposed by the experimenter), or (in respect of parameters affected by a reporter’s purposes and context) some combination thereof?
May the extent of combining of context meaningfully stimulate, effect, and avail a different interpretation of reality in respect of each reporter’s purpose and point of view? Is a different holography of “reality” (with regard to quality of chance, choice, or coercion) presented to each conceptualizing observer?