tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-189372862024-03-07T01:53:56.296-06:00The Cepia Club BlogThe Cepia Club Blog: The Cepia Club believes individual awareness and activism can lead to a peaceful and prosperous world. This blog contains the pertinent literature, both creative and non-fiction, produced by the Cepiaclub Director and its associates.Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.comBlogger309125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-66148598485418705032023-10-11T17:50:00.003-05:002023-10-17T16:42:12.068-05:00Cepiaclub’s Statement on the Israeli-Hamas War of 2023<p> </p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Cepia Club LLC</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.cepiaclub.com/">www.cepiaclub.com</a>
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">Copyright <span style="font-family: Liberation Serif, serif;">©</span>
2023 The Cepia Club LLC</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">October 11, 2023</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="center" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">Cepiaclub’s
Statement on the Israeli-Hamas War of 2023</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">As both a business
and an organization of like-minded people, all devoted to world peace
and prosperity, we look with horror on the events taking place in and
around the State of Israel and the territories of Palestine,
particularly that of Gaza. While the elements of the state of war
that now exist all predate the recent and current events, it has
myriad causes, harmful influences, and the conflicts of rights and
interests for everyone it involves.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">The Cepia Club LLC
and Cepiaclub denounce the initiation of force and violence—in any
form—by any nation or group or individual, in order to solve
political, economic, social, or cultural differences.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">Our groups believe
in the dignity of the individual to protect themselves and their
families and friends, and to have sole and undivided self-ownership
of their personal opinions, bodies, properties, and to “the bread
of their own labor.” In order to own these rights, and the sacred
responsibilities for them, people must remain free from the threat or
use of force by anyone who would cause them harm or steal these
fruits of life from them.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">We work so that each
person everywhere may enjoy and pursue their happiness, free from the
ageless sources of conflict, those human demons of fear and greed:
Causes for war upon others or by others.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">In the world of
human liberty and freedom we hope to build as a movement and
philosophy for life, we believe war comes more often and becomes more
deadly as political leaders militarize foreign and defense policies.
As a result of the misuses of power by the powerful, war has become
profitable for the few who make most of the decisions. The insanity
of war and escalation, and of reprisal and retribution, must all come
to an end. If not, humanity will destroy itself.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">The Cepia Club LLC
and Cepiaclub ask people everywhere to work with us using positive,
tolerant, spirited, and peaceful measures to help us build a world
where liberty and freedom thrive without war and its corruption of
the human soul.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">May we achieve the
universal dream:
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Peace on Earth;
Goodwill toward All.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">Thank you,</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">Tim Krenz</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">Owner, The Cepia
Club LLC; & Director, Cepiaclub</p>Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-4184194734885398792023-09-12T18:20:00.002-05:002023-09-12T18:20:20.739-05:00Pi Kielty’s Mandates for the Youth<p> </p><p align="center" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Pi Kielty’s Mandates for
the Youth</b></span></p>
<p align="center" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="center" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">By Pi Kietly, </span>
</p>
<p align="center" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">p.h., 2023</span></p>
<p align="center" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Dear Young People,</span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Please, take these mandates
seriously, and consider using them in your journey in this existence.
I learned them, too late, and I always learned them the hard, bitter
way; sometimes even sadly, or in tragedy. I hope they help you to
grow up and become a happier person, no matter what.</span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Mandate One: Take educating
yourself seriously. Learn as much as you can, do it always, and in
any way possible. Stay teachable. Absorb wisdom from the lessons of
others. It make things easier, and it lessens the inevitable pain in
life. Knowledge determines destiny.</span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Mandate Two: Stay physically
fit. Take care of and respect your health. Build strength and your
moral determination to persist. These actions also build better
character and attitude. In your body, you own the only ship in your
storms, and that vessel will keep your life afloat. Only your body
and mind will take you where you want or need to go in life.</span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Mandate Three: Help your
friends and family and neighbors, because where you live affects you
the most, and you can help that place in positive ways—if you
choose. Own the right and responsibility to care about, serve, and
protect others, especially those in need. We must live here together,
or we will all perish alone.</span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Mandate Four: Stay involved
and participate in civic affairs. Exercise the ownership of your
rights and privileges, your responsibilities and duties, or else
those will all disappear if not maintained with vigilance. When lost
they will vanish for everyone and forever. Become peaceful warriors
for: justice, fairness, tolerance, and empathy. At the end of
everything, leave the better world for those to come after you. Do
not let hate and indifference destroy our homes. Forgive the past and
the present, or no one will have a future.</span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Sincerely yours,</span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">[Signed]</span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Pi Kielty</span></p>Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-82751328129657399502023-07-27T14:58:00.003-05:002023-07-27T14:59:41.848-05:00Meeting Notes & Minutes, 2nd Annual Candidates & Campaigns Conference, Facilitated by Cepiaclub<p> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
2<sup>nd</sup> Annual Candidates & Campaigns Conference</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">Hosted by the Libertarian Party of Polk
County Members (LPPCM—Wisconsin)</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">Facilitated by The Cepia Club LLC</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">July 15, 2023</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">Meeting Notes & Minutes</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Opening: brief introductions, discussed
Cepia Club, and Phil Anderson’s history. Meeting goal – discuss
strategy over a platform and develop ideas we can use going forward.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Libertarian Party
of Polk County Members</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Second Annual
Candidates & Campaigns Conference Saturday, July 15, 2023, 11:00
AM to 2:30 PM Village Pizzeria, Dresser, WI 54009</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Key Topic to
Address:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">"How can
Libertarians build for successful politics and campaign to WIN
elections!"</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Working discussion
subjects:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><b>1) How do
Libertarians define successful politics?</b></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Ross – let's Define Success:
successful points success is a case that leads to a win in politics.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Notes<i> – at the national level, the
Libertarian party there is an issue that some of the party won't move
from their ideas( there were a few stories and anecdotes during this
point ) Ross further noted that is important to read the room and
know who you're speaking.</i></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The libertarian party should be open to
ideas and principles and it's important to compromise without moving
away from the core values of the Libertarian ideology.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Tim – Being a libertarian outside of
just elections, showing those ideas
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Turning a person's experience into a
strategy. Create a narrative – that can be used to tell a story
that clicks emotionally this should lead to a Eureka moment.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Ross – recommends “the man nobody
knows” by Bruce Barton This book brings together logic and emotion
and went to use them The book uses an allegory to describe Modern
Advertising.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Tim and Phil – People are in a type
of codependent relationship with the government we need to be there
to show them that there's a better option. It's the choose the lesser
of two evils mentality we need to be a better option.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Tim – Culture is key and critical</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Phil – Some current strategies that
didn't work Ron Paul's ending of the Fed was not a winning one ending
the FED goes over the head of most of the electorate, largely
because it doesn't directly affect them however Paul’s argument for
peace was a winning argument That caught people's attention.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Note: How do we bring ending the Fed to
people'sattention? This was never covered but brought up.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>points summarized</b></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<ol>
<li><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Middle verses division or finding
common ground</p>
</li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Educating people this can mean
many things from what the libertarian party is about to what we as
indevdiuals can do to change the political landscape.
</p>
</li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Message and image
</p>
</li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Creating an emotional appeal
</p>
</li></ol>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br /></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><b>2) What goal(s)
concretely represent success?</b></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Local level –
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
1) Find someone to run and have an aligned mesage
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
2) In an area find a good candidate with high numbers higher
population means more potential members – its math.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
3) Double members both recurrent and new – we fail to retain
members and are slow to breing in new members,
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
3.2) really just double membership, money, and anything else that
can be doubled.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
4) comradery is key</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
5) “Get with the Times” – update our media presence –
Media has shifted away from the “Big 5” to Youtube, tiktok,
twitter etc.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
6) 30 second clips on Social media is the “New media” . only
showing examples of what happening avoiding any fluff and opinion.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><b>3) As a matter
of the practical, identifiable political objective(s) for the
Libertarian</b></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <b>Party, how do we
match the goal(s) to obtain both? </b>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Tim – Have a
libertarian candidate win a race by 2024. Example would be sheriff or
distract attorney.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Arin – Media
monetization.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Phil – to have a
canidate represented on the polls.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Bill – Educate
the populace on the mesage of the Libertarian party.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Kay – Strengthen
female numbers, participation, and representation (double it).</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Lynn – Work to
find common ground with those who are interested in the party.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Paul – Do more
Salons that can help show the common ground.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Ross – Create
oppritunities to discover common ground.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><b>4) As measures,
or strategies, to achieve the objective, to fulfill the policy
goal(s), where does the Libertarian Party start and how does it end?</b></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><b>Where it ends</b>
– the world is free and there is no goverment.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><b>To get there:</b></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Lynn – Government
is broken down in a narrow sense: schools are governed at a local
level, Universities and medical at the state level Fed at the
infurstructure level roads etc.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Paul – finding an
image that resonates with the people.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">The rest of the
group – Non-currupt goverment and reduce goverment size.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">5) What actions at
the "tip of the spear," i.e. activism, will most
effectively maintain the focus on the objectives and achieve the
political objective?</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Tim – Hand shakes
and coffee. Getting out on the ground and meeting with people one on
one or in small gatherings as much as possible.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Phil and Ross –
persuasive media, hitting the main point(s) efficiently, three times
daily. Control the message and always bring it back to you.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Arin and Paul –
offer a civil space
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">6) What format(s)
or structure(s) of organization and leadership does the Libertarian
Party need to adapt or reject to achieve the objective?
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Tim – personal
connections, meetings in person over online as much as possible. The
structure should be on the work, not the
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Phil –
Organization should be from the ground up. In-person meetups building
from local to the state, not the post above to the ground.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Lynn – the
members should do the work – living by example
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Paul – The party
should be working through civility and common ground. We should be
helping people understand its not a wasted vote when voting for any
party.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Arin – get across
the central mesage
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Ross – helped to
get to these messages</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">7) Finally, how can
Libertarian Party members, activists, and supporters best carry the
example and message of the Libertarian Way, to succeed?</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Phil – Cares
about how people live their lives – people being allowed to live
life to its fullest and toward their full potential. You have to care
and it has to show.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</p>Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-90401200006466281942023-04-18T15:00:00.002-05:002023-04-18T15:00:49.901-05:00Space: Possibilities and Ambitions Unlimited: Part II—Dirty Origins<p> </p><p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Space: Possibilities and Ambitions Unlimited: Part II—Dirty
Origins</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
By Tim Krenz</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
April 13, 2023</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The early effort to get humanity off the planet and into orbit took
the aspect of a competition, the Space Race: A vigorous and hostile,
win or lose challenge between the United States of America and the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. More so, the military of both
countries drove the early competition, pushing the technical agendas
and developing the equipment to win the prize. That prize, merely one
dimension of the Cold War between the West and the East, held the
stakes as the champion of the world as achieved by the winners system
of civilization.</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In the eyes of that world, the reward of prestige would go to which
country, the USA or the USSR, won the minds and imaginations of the
rest of humanity. Everything about the early Space Race, though, had
a dual dynamic, of either one for launching objects and people into
orbital space, or the other for delivering nuclear weapons against
its adversary.</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Both the American and the Soviet military captured two valuable
assets at the end of the Second World War. Into their hands, these
presumed allies obtained both the records, materials, instruments,
and models of the German rocket program, the program that Germany’s
Adolf Hitler hoped would become his wonder weapons of magic to
reverse his ailing fortunes in his lost war. And, secondly, and more
importantly, both the emerging Cold War rivals in the immediate
post-war period captured numerous German scientists, some of them
bona fide Nazi Party devotees. Some histories may say that one side
or the other got more of or the better of one German asset as opposed
to the other. Allowing this as only immaterial propaganda, both the
Americans and the Soviets captured, and put to work, plenty of all
the confiscated German scientist, engineers, documents, and
equipment.</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Among the most famous of the German scientists, Wernher von Braun,
the genius behind Hitler;’s rocket program, found refuge with his
invaluable skills in the service to the United States. Hitler’s
most successful rocket, designated the A-4, also known as the V-2 (V
stood for “Vengeance Weapon,” or <span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Liberation Serif, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“</span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Liberation Serif, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Vergeltungswaffen”),
a true guided ballistic missile, produced von Braun’s penultimate
tribute for Nazi power. Once they got into the possession of the
Americans and the Soviets they became the basis for nearly all early
post-war research and experiments. For the rest of his life, as an
American space program designer, von Braun received deserved
questions and suspicions by the press and human rights advocates for
his wartime help to Hitler and the Nazis. In the last years of the
war, especially as Germany produced A-4/V-2 systems on an industrial
scale, the German rocket program functioned and achieved tactical
success by the benefit of slave labor, particularly by Jewish
concentration camp inmates.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Liberation Serif, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Many
of the details of the Soviet rocket program remained cloaked, but it
also benefited from scientist with similar stripes as von Braun. Due
to the closed, police-state nature of the Soviet Union’s social
system, the Soviets did not voice or allow qualms about their German
scientists. They probably just did not care, in light of their need
for technical achievements.</span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Liberation Serif, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">If
American rocketry had its prime author and spirit in the early 20</span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><sup><span style="font-family: Liberation Serif, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">th</span></span></span></span></span></sup></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Liberation Serif, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
Century work of Robert Goddard, it compromised the naivete of rocket
politics with von Braun and his war refugee associates.. And in the
politics of the matter, the birth of the bigger rockets following the
A-4/V-2 gave animated life to the larger Cold War. In the 1950s,
with the US Army, the US Navy, and the US Air Force all developing
rocket systems for the first truly Intercontinental Ballistic
Missiles (ICBMs, or the SLBMs, for the Submarine-launched variety),
rockets became fashionable language in the vocabulary of both the
professional military and the civilian defense intellectuals. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Liberation Serif, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Along
with programs like the US Air Force’s under General Bernard
Schriever, mirroring similar Soviet efforts, to build the big
missiles capable of carrying the big nuclear weapons, a Cold War
language and logic foreign to the ways of peace developed. The new
words and arguments, syllogisms for doomsday or avoiding it, took the
form of: “Throw-weight,” for how many megatons of destruction
could the missile deliver; “circular error of probability” (CEP),
or how close can the warhead hit the target(?); “deterrence,”
what stops each side from starting the final Armageddon;
“Counter-force strategy,” attacking the enemy nuclear weapons in
a first, devastating surprise strike, to disable them; “City
Busting,” hitting the enemy cities, since no useful military
targets remain, as retaliation for a surprise attack’s success. And
the final delusive definition in the logic of hopeless futures:
“MAD,” meaning “mutual assured destruction”--if anyone
started a nuclear war, it would destroy both the attacker and the
defender completely, in the finale.</span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Liberation Serif, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Multitudes
of rockets became vogue, more glamorous than the lakes of fire and
brimstone they carried as nuclear weapons. At least rockets could
have a scientific, peaceful use, even if in a competitive aspect of
the Cold War. From the Jupiter missiles, and the Thor and the Titan
missiles/rockets, to the purely military variety of missile weapons
like the Minuteman series (I-III), and the Polaris (an SLBM
variety)--all of the late 1950s design and development—the next
levels in the science of the Space Race advanced. But space, not war,
appealed to the world public. For Americans, it first, though, had to
scare them into intelligent action.</span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Liberation Serif, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">On
October 4, 1957, and building on their own military and related
research, the Soviets surpassed their early experiments and successes
(like the SS-1, designated “Scud A”) in the post-war race. On
that autumn day, the Soviet Union successfully launched and placed
into a low elliptical Earth orbit the first known human-made
satellite. They called it Sputnik (a name inferred as meaning “Fellow
Traveler,” in rough translation, or “Co-wayfarer”). This
satellite flew overhead, over any nations in its trajectory, ignoring
the rights of sovereign territory or protected airspace. It
accidentally set a new legal precedent in international law, by
incidentally orbiting anywhere. Sputnik emitted a radio signal, and
its “beep-beep” galvanized a Soviet psychological victory in the
eyes of the world. </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Liberation Serif, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">For
a well-deserved and tremendous achievement in engineering
applications, the Soviet civilization took the credit, rightly, and
espoused their belief in the tenets of Marxist-Leninist science.
Sputnik impressed the world, and gave Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev
posh and credibility when he told the world that Soviet-led block
would conquer humanity’s future. Besides the purely propaganda
advantages for the Soviet Union, Sputnik proved to US President
Dwight D. Eisenhower and everyone else that if the Soviets could put
a small satellite into orbit, they could also drop nuclear weapons
the same way. Time in the Space Race and in the Cold War, to develop
ballistic missiles carrying weapons, became absolutely a critical
factor.</span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Liberation Serif, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">US
satellites followed, including military intelligence and
communications space vehicles. Yet, while the entire world worried
about Soviet war-making rocket policies and threats with “missile
diplomacy,” Eisenhower took two more discrete, and more important
moves on the solar system game board. First, Eisenhower got the US
Congress to fund a budget for a revolutionary education program, one
that focused on building the nation’s abilities to produce
graduates in the areas of Science, Technology, Engineering, and
Mathematics (STEM). That policy became a game changer in every way
for the duration of the Cold War, even as soon as the next decade,
and especially for the Space Race.</span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Liberation Serif, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Secondly,
except for the unified military space programs, almost largely
unknown and secret still six decades later, Eisenhower consolidated
the rest of the US space effort in a part-civilian, AND a
part-military National Aeronautics & Space Administration. At
least for both the pure research and the purely practical aspects of
America’s public space program, Eisenhower put a less war-like
moniker on the history books. While the dual purpose programs ran,
and still run, dividing the military and the civilian programs put a
human face on the latter. The secret military programs continued, and
still operate, mostly with a mask, a veil, and a blindfold all at
once.</span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Liberation Serif, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Moving
from the Army payroll to head a section of NASA’s rocket research
and development, Wernher von Braun became a very public face for the
American space programs. Despite his denials of his sketchy history
working either FOR or AS a Nazi (NO one really knows, only the US
Government), Braun’s vision for space reflected the other
contemporary visionaries or the ones that came before him—whether
American, British, or Russian, etc. To prove humanity’s worth, it
needed to conquer space, and do so with a resounding achievement.
Whether of dreams, nightmares, reality, or chimera, the future of
humanity in space, like this narrative, continues to unfold.</span></span></p>Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-82812099402556904412023-02-14T23:47:00.006-06:002023-02-14T23:47:38.766-06:00Space: Possibilities and Ambitions Unlimited: Part I—Missed Opportunity<p> Space: Possibilities and Ambitions Unlimited: Part I—Missed
Opportunity</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
By Tim Krenz</p><p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In recorded history, whether by archaeological or written accounts,
humanity has always thought and dreamed beyond the practical limits
of the circumstances of survival. We need our imagination, as well
as sleeping dreams, to balance current demands with the subconscious
desire to expand beyond the drudgery of working today in order to
live slightly better tomorrow. Looking up to the sky, those dreamy
heavens of stars and wonder, we might not know who, how or what
invented us or the universe; nor do we know what or when fate awaits
us in it. But we can assume that as long as humans have lived on
earth, some men and women of imagination and in their dreams have
speculated on the immensity above and the limitless possibilities of
what we can know and do down here, and up there.</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
With these things apparent, humanity’s short history and long-term
future inevitably rapture themselves in the bigger questions of the
universe. Discounting the theological and eschatological arguments of
beginnings and endings, the other questions persistently enlarge and
require more research, experiment, testing, and result. Even if
humanity and its future in the “really big place” we call the
universe finds no truly definitive answers, the expansion of
knowledge, capabilities, plans, and achievements for bettering human
existence will go on into the future, as it applies to life on earth
and humanity in outer space.</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Looking back on the last one hundred years, the world had emerged
from the First World War and the global failure to avoid avoidable
mistakes in politics and culture. Even in the prosperity of the
1920s, the impact of losses that war incurred by humanity’s
inconceivable cruelty to each other killed away a generation of
hopes, intellect, potential geniuses. These people the world could
have better used alive, to live in peace and prosperity. The number
of doctors, scientists, even artists, and entrepreneurs lost with
their potential to help the world (or hurt it more, in balanced
honesty), still has not exactly redeemed itself. Yet, hopes and
dreams of people like Jules Verne from the 19<sup>th</sup> Century,
or the insights and horrors of H.G. Wells, remained inspirations to
the select who believed humanity could go to the space above the
earth. An American inventor, Robert Goddard, began and continued his
critical early work on ballistic rocketry. And a conflicted and
soon-controversial man of genius and talent, the German Wernher von
Braun began to see his definitive visions for exploring above the
atmosphere take practical shape and experiment in the 1930s. Whether
professionals or lay people, people working in laboratories, or in
social clubs—from Russia, Germany, England and the United States,
thinkers and dreamers everywhere began to assemble and implement the
vital ingredients and recipes necessary to someday get men (not women
at the time) off the earth and into space orbit and beyond.</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
When, at the end of the 1930s, the mistakes made at the end of the
last war paid a diabolical interest on the principle of errors,
propelling humanity into another and more destructive conflict, the
Second World War. It would become a war even more intensive and
deadly, from the contributions that science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics applied to make and use weapons of more power and
lethal. An evil genius revival for ill took place in order to kill
and destroy on scales far grander than ever seen before in history.
Even so, the tools that people invented to peacefully put man in
space—someday in the future—became instruments of terror and
doom.</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Using the support of the Nazi state, Dr. Wernher von Braun headed the
technical portion of rocket and ballistic missile research for the
German Army, to produce a missile, eventually the Aggregat (A)-4,
later re-designated the V-2, (for “Vergeltungswaffe,” meaning
roughly “revenge weapon” in German). Along with Luftwaffe’s
V-1 rocket-motored cruise missile, Germany used thousands of these
vengeance weapons in the final 11 months of the Second World War in
Europe against Allied cities, ports, and other targets. With rather
primitive guidance systems on this generation of rockets, and because
of restricted conventional weapons payloads, (the V-2 carried roughly
a ton of high explosives), the weapons had little practical tactical
impact in the war. Even considering it as a strategic psychological
weapon, it mostly served as an operational diversion. In terms of
political policy, however, it created significant possibilities.
Assuming material and other forthcoming technical improvements and
advances, as research and development would undoubtedly achieve,
warfare in the missile age put anywhere on the globe at risk of
long-distance attack and at increasingly shorter times. What
honestly started as a thought and a dream for peaceful attempts to
put humanity toward a greater goal, suddenly became instruments of
Armageddon, once the technology for another new weapon of science,
nuclear bombs, made those feasible to combine them with rockets.</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
As with politics at the end of the Second World War, humanity stood
at a possible threshold and turning point, if not the most critical
one so far in history. What happened?</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In politics, the world in the last years of the 1940 and through most
of the 1950s very well needed to come to terms with its sins, to find
some accommodation to end wars and take care of its people, and to
take care of the only planet it has on which to live. Instead of
giving the people peace and amity, political and economic elites
reaped their bitter fruits and relapsed into fear and greed. They
produced a cold war, and repeated similar mistakes committed at the
end of the First World War.</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
On the same coin, at the end of the second war, scientists had
cracked the codes to orbital ballistics, and made space travel
theoretically reachable, and had invented nuclear power, making cheap
energy obtainable. Those two achievements could have combined to put
humanity into a space age, earlier, better, fuller, and with better
consequences for everyone and the earth. A Space Civilization might
even have put humanity at more, if not complete, peaceful
coexistence. No one will know, though. When history and humankind
reach thresholds and turning points, decisions can get made wrongly,
and events then have irreversible and irrevocable consequences.
Instead of rockets and nuclear power for space and peace, leaders
produced political division backed by rockets and nuclear power
created into thermonuclear ballistic weapons, at unimaginable
financial costs, the dividends of which could eventually end all life
on earth.</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
But the story of “Space: Possibilities and Ambitions Unlimited”
continues….see the next part coming soon.</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p>Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-12906108332739802282023-01-02T12:24:00.001-06:002023-01-02T12:24:20.565-06:00On Membership--For the LPWI<p> </p><p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
For the LPWire</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
By Tim Krenz</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
December 13, 2022</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
On Membership</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
From the long-term perspective of a Libertarian Party activist in
Wisconsin, both as a member and a consultant, the Libertarian Party
of Wisconsin has always lacked one critical thing which stymies
success so far: Its lack of membership in large numbers. For in the
sum of the whole effort to implement the platform in the state, the
size of membership means everything. From the membership the Party
derives every resource to its existence: Ideas, finance, comradeship,
and belief.</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
From membership, Libertarian campaigns find every ingredient for
success: Candidates, staff, volunteers, and supporters (financial and
in-kind). In matters of statistical probability, the higher the
quantity of membership totals, the more campaigns the Party can
support. And in a dinosaur or egg question, the more membership it
has, the more the Party will have higher quality efforts—better
prepared candidates, higher experienced staff, more enthusiastic
volunteers, and far wealthier supporters.</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
All of this looks obvious, and simple. But there, in that simplicity,
has always rested the difficulties. The Party has a market, full of
potential customers already subservient to a monopoly, all waiting
for a better option. It has the right product in one package, in
“more freedom and liberty.” On the other hand, it has a dumb
approach to marketing, proven by the fact that it can never sell or
even give away something already free. (No value? Or wrong
approach?). Finally, the Libertarian Party of Wisconsin has a poor
approach to conducting its organizational business. It centralizes
and stovepipes somethings—freedom and liberty—which should expand
like a gaseous cloud, everywhere and expansively, as the laws of
thermodynamics dictate. The Party does not need total anarchy inside
itself, but it can refine some things to increase membership, that
critical element to success.</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The party already exist. People have built it, and torn it down, and
rebuilt it again. But not many people have come to stay and make it
their political home. Why? Here, it might come down to the laws of
attraction. Too often politicians and activist understand problems
but err in vocalizing too much and too loudly what they oppose. From
experience, that has always—and WILL ALWAYS—turn too many people
away. They might decide to stay clear because they see negativity as
a fruitless way to improve things. For any solution, in politics
especially, you cannot just keep opposing something(s).</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Eventually, you have to stand for something, and vocalize and live it
as a positive solution; a better idea in the free-minds markets
should always generate profitable results. Also, logic expressed
with erudition makes people often feel stupid. A parable expressed
as common sense usually gets a more favorable hearing. And, finally,
aggressive statements and acts get taken at face value. People
either submit without commitment to avoid aggression or deter it with
escalation. At all costs, promote peace and understanding and avoid
conflict and danger. Simple stuff? How often do Libertarian
activists fail in these elementary ideas?</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Somewhere in this mix of good and bad points, the Party can find
solutions for increasing the numbers of members who agree with its
freedom and liberty agenda. And the challenges of increasing
membership needs to become and stay priority #1 in 2023. Everything
in the future of the Party depends on that. In the past 30 years,
too much work got wasted dithering over dancing angels (or demons) on
pinheads. The key, the focus, the solutions for the Libertarian Party
of Wisconsin will come in a larger membership. In reality,
membership growth comes only one person at a time. It takes work,
patience, persistence, and toleration. Mostly, it takes experience
and skill to recruit. Yet, only a smarter effort in all things will
achieve anything for the Party we call home.
</p>Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-89872692010520839192022-12-03T12:15:00.002-06:002022-12-03T12:15:39.659-06:00Dancing Smile--My Memory of Kathie (Sather) Cabreanna <p> </p><p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">By Pi Kielty</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">November 29, 2022</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<span style="font-size: medium;">Dancing Smile”</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> —For Kathie, dear
Friend,</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">When Kathie smiled our
sunshine rose.</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Her beaming brought us rays of
gold.</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">As she glided to near our way,</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">We felt the warmth of graceful
sway.</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">She embraced our friendship
closer.</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">We felt welcomed when beside
her.</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">She spoke the songs of joyful
living.</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">No words of doubt could stop
our singing.</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Kathie moved in simple
dancing.</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Unshaken, hopeful, steps
beginning.</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Slender, of golden hair that
glistened; </span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Those wholesome eyes that
looked and listened.</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">She rose near dusk, in light
her life,</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">And we left dark and in our
strife.</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">There she must dance and we
here stay.</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Let Kathie’s smile shine
hearts this day.</span></p>Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-60126270755888661772022-11-18T18:13:00.000-06:002022-11-18T18:13:01.592-06:00Success, Momentum, and Initiative... Keep It Going!<p> </p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
LPWIre article submission</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">By Tim Krenz</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">November 17, 2022</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">Success, Momentum,
and Initiative... Keep It Going!</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">By Tim Krenz,
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">(The views expressed
belong to the author, and do not necessarily represent the policy of
the LPWI)</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"> We have cause to
celebrate in the Libertarian Party of Wisconsin! Although we had only
three candidates this past mid-term election, all three achieved
incredible success. First, an assembly candidate, Carl Hutton, took
23% of the vote, with 3300 ballots cast for him and libertarianism.
Second, Jacob VandenPlas, in a hard-working effort, collected 10.5%
of the vote—over 32,000 people who voted for him in one district,
in the 8<sup>th</sup> US Congressional race. The percentage itself
approaches Ed Thompson numbers in a race all but discounted by the
two-party overlords. As Jacob would point out, his campaign made new
connections with heretofore unreachable constituencies, namely labor
unions and tribal nations. His efforts, and the Libertarian message,
worked with them and with others! He did the work.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"> And for the third
reason for the LPWI to celebrate? Neil Harmon’s 2.07% of the
state-wide vote—54,000 voters—in his four way Secretary of State
campaign will prove huge to the future. For the icing on that cake,
Neil’s totals exceeded 1%, the minimum needed to gain the LPWI
ballot access status for 2024. We can now put our Presidential and
Vice Presidential candidates on the Wisconsin ballot without the need
for thousands of signatures. From my 30 year experience in the
Libertarian Party of Wisconsin, we have had both successes and
failures with ballot access status. Gaining it, and keeping it, while
seemingly minor, nonetheless takes effort—a LOT of effort! It
hurts the Party when we do not have it, and at times we have not
maintained it. Thank Neil, especially, for the effort in his race!
Thank all three candidates for going out and doing the hard work to
represent the Party!</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"> With this election
behind us, and elections ahead, we can enjoy and celebrate the
measured success of 2022, and start our planning for work in 2023 to
build on that momentum. The votes gained, the new connections made,
and with more of the public seemingly wanting us to win but to earn
their vote, we can move ahead. Sometimes, people and organizations
have to make their own luck. Yet, hard work builds its own luck, at
the start. Sometimes, though, seizing an initiative becomes
mandatory. We must use 2022 as the starting point for more success in
the 2024 elections. The hard work necessary comes in the traditional
four keys needed for a winning political party. Those keys:
recruiting membership, organizing affiliates, raising money, and
running campaigns. Do a lot of all of these keys, and we can
implement our platform by winning. Think ahead, act united, focus on
the goals, and look the part, as we get ready for 2024.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Between now and
then, opportunities abound in 2023. Local races, partisan and
non-partisan, give LPWI members and supporters (i.e. future members)
campaign and office holding experience. In 2024, in a general
election, we have the biggest opportunities yet. The times demand
what we as party offer to the people: protecting their freedom and
liberty. First, in 2024, a US Senate race (Baldwin’s seat) gives a
Libertarian candidate a decisive role to compete and win in a three
way, Federal, and state-wide race. Second, we have a chance, not a
forlorn hope, to send our electors to cast ballots for President and
Vice President of the United States. We have nothing to lose by
trying. And third, all the Federal, State and local offices need
Libertarian candidates. If they will not come to us, we must go in
search of them. Again, we have nothing to lose by trying.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Now, let’s follow
2022 with two years of work: To recruit, organize, raise, and run!
Seize the moment, for the right time does not last.</p>Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-27122531252491329722020-11-07T01:57:00.001-06:002020-11-07T01:57:17.788-06:00Leaves By Pi Kielty<p> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Leaves</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">By Pi Kielty (Posthumously)</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Found: November 7, 2020</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Copyright <span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">©</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">
2020 CEPIA Club LLC</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">For
my spirit brother, J.D. Schloss, and his girlfriend, Lisa:</span></p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Thank
you for all the help, and for your tolerance and patience;</span></p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">and
for all of your honest, loving friendship.</span></p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Leaves</span></p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">By
Pi Kielty</span></p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">(Posthumously)</span></p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">November
7, 2020</span></p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">I
sit on grass and look at trees, they in Autumned range, orange, red,
yellow, and some greens. Above my valley, I humble still, scorched
by solitude, but sunbeams thrill. The air grasps clear, the sky,
sky-clean, a blue with whites awaiting the god unseen. I dwell.</span></p>
<p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">My
thoughts deflame, soon serene calms, I pray for his holy peaceful
balm. I fail. Then, I shun that morose, that my heart would ail. A
breeze whisps from behind, through me, my way, shimmers colors,
a'sway the trees, but those leaves do stay. I do now see god waving,
those leaves his hands, calling me, my spirit stands. </span>
</p>
<p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Those
fingers of god rest my mind, my turmoil sated, my heart unbinds.
These colors of life, I now hear the call, in the wind's wattle, of
those leaves of fall. Deepened reds, some orange burns, some yellow
soft, the greens still yearn.</span></p>
<p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">When
I wondered, “Nothing more?” the wind recedes, and I know my
peace. In this valley, the curve, the depth, I see leaves—red-red,
a green, yellow suns, and orange, above them blue and cloud frames
adorn.</span></p>
<p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">God's
words in breathful breeze, his wisdom spoke in rustling leaves, his
brightness clear love, in old trees, of knotty oak, sweet maple, tall
elm, and birch. . . . I seize. My word to the world my hopeful
plea,</span></p>
<p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> “Come, sit my hill. Won't you watch the leaves with me?”</span></p>Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-47476838320479662512020-10-16T02:26:00.003-05:002020-10-16T02:26:58.842-05:00<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/t9uFRq93laE" width="320" youtube-src-id="t9uFRq93laE"></iframe></div><br /> Commercial written, filmed and produced by CEPIA Club LLC for Red Bird Music Store in Osceola, Wisconsin, 54020.<p></p>Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-84138537941188090262020-10-05T06:00:00.003-05:002020-10-05T06:00:58.137-05:00The Four Pillars of Future Progress—Part IV: The Neutral Economy<p> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The Four Pillars of Future
Progress—Part IV: The Neutral Economy</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">By Tim Krenz</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">October 4, 2020</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">For Hometown Gazette</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Copyright <span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">©</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">
2020 CEPIA Club LLC</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">In
this fourth part of the series, “The Four Pillars of Future
Progress,” we examine the idea of a neutral economy, and how a new
thinking of economies, and the dismantling of some of the
established doctrines, might such a thing useful and better for the
world. Going forward to the future, with a goal of sustained goods
and services, how humanity designs, manages, uses, and benefits from
the neutral economy will to a large degree determine the type of
cultures we will have on earth someday. The world faces a clear and
trending choice now between cultures of either slavery or freedom.
After an end state analysis of future progress, when faced with this
choice, most people, one may believe, would rather have freedom, so
people must start now to ensure it. Understanding the concept of a
neutral economy only begins the process of undermining the forces
that would seek to make the many only slaves to the few. New thinking
hopefully will give motivation to readers to take some action on
their own.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Economies
make up the complex system of market trades between actors to procure
or acquire goods and services needed and wanted by both producers and
consumers. Humanity naturally developed economies to satisfy two
things, and two things only: things, or needs, for survival; and
things, or wants, for comfort. And the more complex these trades
become, the more levels of depth get added in goods and services.
People have needs at all times, and had them throughout history.
People also want more comfort, a sign of civilization's prosperity.
Economies exist everywhere in the world, and have existed at all
times in human interactions. Economies need at least two actors in a
transaction of trade. Add more actors, then add more layers of
complexity.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">To
distinguish “economics” from “economies,” economics as social
science simply studies, too often wrongly or inadequately, how
economies and actors act and react to one another. It tries to create
predictive or explanatory frameworks for understanding or managing an
economy of diffuse markets. Most of the theories, but not all, and
not at all the very strict laws of economics (like the “law of
supply and demand,” for instance), can sometimes cause detrimental
effects to actors in a market of trades as a matter of economic
policy. In the area of policy, we find the institution of “political
economy,” a descriptive term for the system of the overall social
management of cost inputs and benefit outputs in an economy. And, in
a rather malicious way, the acts and actors of political-economics
determine most often in a biased and manipulative way the questions
of “who gets what, when, why, where and how?”</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Discounting
other theories, models, and the history of partisan political biases
and manipulation of economics for the moment, we can briefly survey
some objective, more pure features of an economy, or what we can term
as “the neutral economy.” Before doing so, to answer a begging
question: Yes, an economy has some very neutral and natural forms and
characteristics. By doing this survey, we should arrive at how a
neutral economy can create a system of markets of trades that
preserves and increases human freedom for the most people possible.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">An
economy has many characteristics of the physical sciences, if readers
can accept the meaning and illustrations. It resembles many
principles of physics, and even thermodynamics and fluid dynamics, in
some aspects. Most professional economists will despise such
analogies. One wonders why, if not for the very simplicity of
understanding it gives, it also makes mockeries of most of their
models and predictive theories.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">As
in physics, an economy in neutral form works in the same fashions of
gravity, inflation, diffusion, orbits, equilibrium, and attraction.
But to illustrate only a select few, supply follows demand for an
economic product, from providers who have it to consumers who need or
want it, with the same irresistible gravity that make things fall to
the earth. The first </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i>primus</i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">
law of economy, that of supply and demand, all things remaining equal
and neutral, works for food, clothing, shelter, and energy, as well
as for transportation, or any product, legal or contraband. If the
body of consumers desire it, then providers will offer it. The larger
the group of consumers, the more superior gravity, the more it draws
it, from inferior bodies. Market mechanisms in trades (sort of like
attraction in physics) will match demand with supply. Another,
similar, physical example comes from the means of trade, the
instruments of the transaction. Money, or capital, or labor, or
indeed any rents on the supply side, or from the demand side in terms
of any investment and savings, will find the paths of least
resistance, and consequently the highest returns, and settle into
their orbits. Capital goes where it needs to go, in short. </span>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Economics
also works in efficient modes, when neutral, like the theory of
energy (see; Pillars, # 3, “On Energy”). The transactions in
neutral form must equal, in inputs and outputs, for the transaction
to balance and have the same equity between supply and demand for the
actors. Otherwise, if not, one side of the equation suffers depletion
of the resources available. For the fairness of the transaction in
material/physical terms, the result of a “deal” must balance.
Just like energy in the universe, which few people ever seem to
admit, we only have a finite amount of resources on the earth, and
even the opportunity costs to exploit them (investment) depletes
another resource somewhere else. With this in mind, and also like
energy, true wealth on earth comes from the earth and that wealth can
never truly get created or destroyed, in resource terms. The resource
wealth can only change form or change hands in the process. “E</span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">arth
to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust” (from </span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
Book of Common Prayer</span></i></span></span></span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">).
Again, this takes place in the purer form of economy, one neutral and
natural, and without the dogma and religion of money to distort
it—but money, either as a true currency or fiat currency, has its
own story elsewhere.</span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">When
he wrote his magisterial study on economics in the 18</span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: #222222;"><sup><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">th</span></span></span></span></sup></span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
Century, </span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">An
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations</span></i></span></span></span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
(1776), Adam Smith discussed how an economy works, if freely allowed
to trade in markets, and did not so much endorse a bias for a system
of capitalism as we know it today. Only one particular type of
economy, capitalism has its own peculiar spots on its leopard skin,
one of immense bias and manipulation. Actually a professor in
Scotland who lectured on “natural philosophy,” (an </span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">ancien
regime</span></i></span></span></span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
name for physics, etc.), Adam Smith described and contrasted market
ideas as they then existed and how they could work more efficiently.
In the pure, natural forms of economy, Smith's philosophy reads more
for a strict neutrality between production and consumption, than for
the type of rigid controls the political-economic classes have
exerted on the functions of economies since his book appeared.
Wrongly known as the father of capitalism, Adam Smith should have
more renown as the founder of a neutralist economic philosophy.</span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Now
to contrast a neutral economy with one of bias and manipulations, we
need to keep in mind the physical-material analogies of science.
Like water flowing downhill, or like any physical principle that
sciences can understand and divert or change, political-economic
engineers can manipulate the flow of resources, inputs, outputs, and
destinations—similar to dams, canals, breaks, reservoirs,
aqueducts, etc. The union of political and business classes have
always and probably always will try to create distortions in the
economic terrain to divert or differ the outcome of any economy.
Doing so, they create the unnatural and “un-neutral” economy that
decides and determines the questions: who gets what, when, why, where
and how? In other words, engineering the physical principles of
economy create results different from the neutral and natural flow.</span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Whether
in the state-capitalist system of the modern world which actually
amounts to welfare for the rich by a statutory-endorsed fraud of a
trust, or the communist system of a dictatorship of the proletariat,
with the </span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Nomenklatura</span></i></span></span></span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
elite as top beneficiaries (another welfare for the rich scheme), and
every system in between them, government and business collusion in
economic engineering directs resources to wherever the
political-economic class wants them to go. Only a neutral economy, in
a system free of political-economic bias, as in the natural universe
of physics, prevents this corrupt fraud against natural law and for
nature's god when men and women can eat a plentiful bread of their
labors. Without a neutral economy, one where the physical principles
of nature move freely, the needs and wants of people will always
suffer to the corruption of power and those who unjustly use it to
benefit themselves.</span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">While
an economy has multiple groups in common interests, control of an
economy by one vested interest ultimately affects, negatively, all
other interested actors. And when political-economic rulers run an
economy with bias, it puts all at the prey of corruption. In the end,
it all amounts to some type of open or closed bonded servitude of one
group to another, usually majority interests segments to a minority
interest sect. When and if times of scarcity or crisis happen, as
they have repeatedly happened in history, the few in control of an
economy get first choice. They eat better, in short. With those tools
and ways of engineering an economy by design, the powerful remain in
control. This would happen not as an absolute certainty, but as a
normal and repeated temptation of power. And the temptations of power
keep the few fed and free and the multitude starving and in an
unnatural and, in reality, in an even unwitting slavery.</span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Economics
distribute the needs and wants of a society, but markets of different
kinds form them, with the parts creating the sum of the whole.
Markets, by demonstration in the same history, do an efficient job of
matching buyers with sellers, and balancing risks and investments,
for the distribution of goods and services. And, as stated, every
market has its own vested interests and its own dominant actors. How
does this reconcile a biased economy, a need for a neutral economy,
with the want of a culture of freedom? In a more abstract theory, the
more markets that exist, and the more diversification of buyers and
sellers and risks and investments, the freer the needs and wants of
actors become matters of choice and consent.</span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In
physical principles, we can take the laws of thermodynamics, the
second law of which recognizes the eventual equilibrium of two
separate systems when allowed to interact. To explain further, when
the economy of the supply and demand system and the investment and
risk system interact, as a matter of individual actors given fuller
freedom to choose and consent—with a free, neutral system serving
as a catalyst—the equilibrium in the market will remain efficient
and free. The sums or resources should remain naturally equal between
inputs and outputs as a result. What about the alternative with the
biased outcome system as a catalyst? The equilibrium (still there,
after all) would remain the same corrupt and fraudulent economic
systems as now exist all over the world.</span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">To
progress into the future, we face a multi-faceted dilemma. Some
resources for basic survival may, and some already do, get scarcer.
Some, however, become and will become more usable and plentiful, once
processes of research, investment, production and purchase take
place. To achieve progress, in a false sense, as a way of upholding a
further civilization of humanity on earth, a closed economy under the
biases and manipulations of the few would only bring an ever-more
oppressive, restrictive, and impoverished world for all but those few
who rule the systems. That world would not have choice or consent as
a positive system of equilibrium between needs and wants and
investment and risk, but only a negative fate of systems of more
violence and destruction in the competition for dwindling resources
and returns. This negative result would occur both between present
nation-states and within the current constructs of national borders,
if any such things as nation-states and borders even persist.</span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Creating,
and simply letting a neutral, natural economy between people operate,
but one with some safeguards for vulnerable groups and individuals in
dangerous areas of policy, might solve more problems than they pose.
Free systems inside the economies in history have never really
existed before, but the natural philosophy, the so-called physical
principles, do work in nature, and they very well could work in
man-made systems of trade and exchange for needs and wants. If at
all costs, the mechanism of demand and supply—the demand for
freedom and the supply of resources—can rectify the age old problem
of humanity. That problem needing resolution: whether “priests and
princes” will control resources and the fate of humanity, or
whether people themselves and physical nature should determine their
own destiny. That eternal struggle for power can only end in one of
two ways: either people find true freedom from the fears of need and
want or whether a political-economic class of the few force those
very same people into the base fears of no freedoms for speech or
conscience, i.e. the freedom for choice and consent.</span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">A
neutral economy can save the future. It must form one of the pillars
of future progress. It can prevent wars and genocide, which powerful
people in a corrupt system have always brought upon the world. The
neutral economy at least leaves everyone free to pursue needs and
wants, in peace, and in terms of resources, in a pattern that brings
positive equilibrium. Otherwise, only the few will live through the
struggle to survive their own miscarriages of justice and corruption.
How do we create a neutral economy? In the end, we only have to
choose it, consent to it, practice it, and live it in the future. The
struggle of humankind now continues.</span></span></span></span></span></p>Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-27860936891153494082020-09-21T01:08:00.000-05:002020-09-21T01:08:06.025-05:00The Amy Trilogy--Three Poems by Pi Kielty<p> </p><p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The Amy Trilogy</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Three Poems</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">By Pi Kielty</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">(Posthumously)</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Swimming</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">By Pi Kielty</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">For Amy</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">They swam tempest rain for
the stars,</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">She his own Venus, he her
Mars.</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Above those clouds, they
did swim far</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Became their own, though
short the hours.</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The fondest tones, their
gentle talk,</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Escape they made from
Thief the Clock.</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Throwing all fears, those
twining knots;</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Holding their hands, they
swam not walked.</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Last no chances, T'is not
the time;</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Stealing thunder, the
clock unwinds,</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">they speak hope's words,
with hopeful minds.</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Heavy rain, pattered all
the chimes.</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And as they swam to higher
realms,
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Embraced in views, sharing
spells,</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">They did no wrong, to hear
no bells.</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Fleeing time's rain, they
swim too well.</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Falling</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">By Pi Kielty</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">For Amy</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Falling in lonely winding
time,</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">That ribbon which all
things will bind.</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">She grabbed my hand, I
hit no wall.</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Her clasping bond, doth
holds my fall.</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Dropping together, direct
through;</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Hope for time may travel
far, too.</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And yet, we falling, we
may'st share</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Those fates a'falling. Can
time dare?</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">May we move on, past
timing strife,</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Overcoming time's shorted
life,</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">We may fall up, or fall
far down.</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Together we fall. Time
unbound.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Tremble: A Pory</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">By Pi Kielty</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">For Amy</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Trudging my field, that green smell
lifts with quiet heat. No clouds to blind my sun, July hammering, my
hair undone.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">No hat, no sleeves, no covering of
leaves, my feet and soul naked, but a flower unseen. The heat burns
my steady heart beat, my sweaty quest to find the thrown seed.
Finding not the bud I tossed, the wind had waft-blown my soul. My
time, now lost.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I know it lives, here, somewhere, that
flowering seed, without voice. “I MUST find IT! For love of GOD!”
I decree. But I never make my better choice. My deed must find me.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">My mortality beckons, and I in broken
stand. “I wish it became my time,” says this sorrowed man.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Near the coming cloud from the west,
the sun creeps low, down earthly crest. The wind blows its early hint
of storm. I trodden home forlorn, self-hating, and alone.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">“I hope my blossom freely given, not
to change, scorn, or own.”</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I approach the oak tree, and I rest on
grass, in front the fields, the shade's last grasp. Night won't
reveal. Here I sit and I fail my cry, unheard, unnoticed, as daytime
dies. In the breeze, now strong but still warm, the hay waves like
great water, its green dusky caps, a lathering foam.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Does god bless my, these eyes! In the
field's edge, I see a flicker-color, my one near the hedge. Too far
to touch, too grandly unspoiled, I look at you; color pink, form; my
passion boils. Your petals arch, then they embrace, like wind. I
clench my eyes, my mind clearing, your stem: sobbing me with rain,
and I relent feeling. I know this pain.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">In our eyes, we look, and I say, “I
can't help loving you.”
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Then you return instead, “I know, but
I won't stay.” I tremble sad still. Then, from us, we turn away.</p>Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-75595878216058027632020-08-03T19:45:00.001-05:002020-08-03T19:45:44.080-05:00Trailer for Underground Life: The Sub Terra Vita Chronicles By Tim Krenz<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YbQm4uzq2SE" width="480"></iframe>Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-88069901211589071672020-06-05T04:09:00.002-05:002020-06-05T04:09:33.525-05:00The Four Pillars of Future Progress—Part III: Energy<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Four Pillars of Future
Progress—Part III: Energy</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
By Tim Krenz</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
For Hometown Gazette</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In this third section of the series,
The Four Pillars of Future Progress, we examine the most fundamental
element of continuing human development on earth, that of energy.
Like all critical issues to the present and future survival of our
species, it seems that few can accept a frank discussion of either
the reality, nor an open debate about the requirements for sound
policy—to guarantee humanity's future when it comes to energy.
Without going into theoretical physics, or into detailed technical
descriptions, the salient, much more practical points speak for
themselves.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Everything gets created out of energy.
Everything destroyed gets turned into some other form of energy. No
person can create more energy that does not already exist. Energy
transfers and takes different forms, but still the fundamental
building blocks, simplified as protons, electrons and neutrons, all
remain parts of everything. Whether we talk about stars, water,
concrete, or the human body, everything just described applies, and
nothing, not logic nor fake logic, can defy this basic premise of
energy. Unless we accept and work within these rules, we have no
future, nor anything to discuss, except about digging billions of
graves. Energy uses, not necessarily only clean energy, but all uses
of energy by humanity, will decide our future in the universe. It
will also determine whether or not humanity's right to natural
liberty and dignity will continue to exist.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
We learned the basics of human survival
in elementary school: food, clothing, and shelter. We also use fire
as the fourth basic component, since it gives the motive force of
energy for cooking, heating in colder climates, and for modern
transportation. Fire transforms energy, from organic compounds like
woods or oils, etc. into heat and flame. Food, clothing, and shelter
also come from materials produced by the natural processes of
converting energy. Food means energy too, for the human body. These
examples reiterate the point that everything comes from and returns
to energy—protons, electrons, and neutrons. Since everything we
have, or want to have or need, comes from some type of energy and
process, we had best understand the implications and arrive at some
point of a philosophy, science, or even art and policy for utilizing
it.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Politically, control of energy means
control of civilization. So much political power extends from the
end of a gun barrel, as China's communist dictator, Mao Zedong, once
famously said. But more than just political power, political control
over people comes from the state ownership of sovereign energy
resources and the things created out of and by energy. In libertarian
philosophies, ownership of property by the individual, including over
their own bodies, ensures the personal rights of nature against any
evil or mal-intent by a government.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
But the ownership of energy and the
disposal of all energy resources by the discretion and at the service
of the state, guarantees a willing submission of people to a state to
ensure the smooth access to energy, and to those products and
services made by it. Whether we talk of petroleum products for
fertilizers for food, or gas for cars, or the clothing and shelter
people need, or home heating and air conditioning for
homes—everything needs energy inputs for our ever more modernized
civilization to function. This makes the consumer the willing and
submissive participant to the state which oversees the allocation of
all energy resources This phenomenon of political control over the
economy, society and the culture itself builds a self-reinforcing
feedback loop, as civilization develops ever-increasing needs for
energy. As the allocator and regulator of last and final resort, the
state does become ever more absolute in reality, in deed and fact,
the more people depend on it for energy to power it.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The universe can provide more energy
than humans can ever use to infinity. And, yet, the universe has only
a stable and unchanging amount of energy in it. On earth, we use
things created by energy, manufactured by nature since the beginning
of time. At the root of the problem, using energy—electrical,
mechanical, nuclear, and chemical processing—comes by harnessing
one form of energy and transforming it into another. Humans have
become adept at collecting, converting, transforming, and exploiting
energy for its own uses, one of the best signs of the intensive
development of human intelligence. However, no such thing as free
energy exists. After using energy, the total input must equal the
total output. But energy can leave extra parts after its conversion
into something else, even waste, as long as the totals equal on both
ends of the process.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Harnessing energy presents opportunity
costs. In economics, these opportunity costs get fulfilled by way of
capital investments, in order to build processes to use the energy
provided by the universe. And, building those processes require
energy as well, just to get useful energy products. This principle
applies in making concrete or getting nuclear power plants to produce
electricity, or a petroleum refinery producing gasoline. All energy
on earth comes to the earth or from the earth, sooner or later, and
it will leave the earth long after any human extinction. “Ashes to
ashes, dust to dust,” the cycle will go forward, always. And
whether we talk of energy or a luncheon, nothing comes free.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
When converting energy by nature or via
man-made processes, the results come with costs and benefits. Energy
conversion brings great power, like electricity, but with
side-effects, like pollution, if not done efficiently. The energy
equation remains equal on both sides, but one side has electricity
plus pollution to equal one factor of resource on the other side.
Energy inefficiency creates wastes of both energy and capital, in
dollar terms. And we here we face the inescapable dilemma.
Civilization needs energy, but that creates problems.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In as much as the Earth only contains
so much energy in resources, we must find better ways of not wasting
the energy itself, or wasting where society invests its capital
dollars. This arrives at a crucial crux, in that the earth can only
hold so much waste product from humans before the delicate balances
between energy, waste, humanity, and the earth will start to
disintegrate. It may do so sooner, or much later, but it will happen
either way. And for the earth, it will protect itself. Humanity can
do so, too. The earth has no choices in which direction it will
restore the balance to itself. Humanity has choices. So far, in all
matters of energy and climate, humans have thought and acted
stupidly, on both sides of this argument. Better policies might
work.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Before looking at policies, we must
first admit some reality. Humans will never free itself from energy
dependence. How we think of energy, in a more complete form, may
change how we use it. Some serious issues face humanity. In the
essentials, the more we build a civilization arithmetically more
dependent on energy—whether in the basics or the comfort factors of
life—the more exponential the problem of costs and benefits in
turning energy into products and services. By becoming that much
more dependent on energy, individual political freedom and natural
rights suffer and shrink to the benefit of a more absolutist state
and its core elites. With freedom and rights shrinking, the power of
the state and its passive capacity to control people and their
conscience grows, and allows the state to allocate more energy to
allies who may support a corrupt or harmful agenda. The political
power of the state would then grow so monolithically so as to
suppress any and all dissent from their control.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
To the extent that human experience and
imagination do so, we can still now make choices. We must eventually.
Some of these involve political choices, economic choices, social
choices, and cultural choices, and all involve technology-based
issues.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Politically-technologically, any
attempt by the state to impose a top-to-bottom change on how we use
energy, whether or not aimed at preventing climate catastrophes, will
fail on two counts. It would fail first because not everyone will
agree to a change, let alone a solution. And, second, it will end in
the absolute power of the monolithic state which ends free choice.
Why does that fail? Because absolutist states have no reason to
change or solve anything to anyone's benefit, other than that which
benefits a small ruling class. On the opposite, more correct side
philosophically, individual and community initiatives and ownership
of solutions bring more diverse innovation, from the free debate and
mixing of collaborative innovations and contributions. When
discussing energy, this applies to all use of energy resources, for
electrical and mechanical power, and conversion of resources into
products and services. Supplying new innovations to new demands by
consumers benefits energy conservation and efficiency and works as
well as it does any other freely made individual and community choice
in a common interest and goal.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
It would work better than an absolutist
state in solving energy supply and demand for one simple reason.
Politicians support their friends. Free individuals must in most
normal cases support themselves. By working in communities for
solutions, more individual initiative has greater and quicker impact.
We have only these two ways, politically, of going forward to
address the macro-need for energy efficiency with limited resources.
States with dictatorial powers have always failed. They failed on
energy long ago to work in the public interests. They have already
tried. Now, free individuals and communities must think of and work
on their own solutions. Everyone owns this problem. Most normal
people want someone else to fix it, but not at great cost to them.
The state will serve its own narrow interests. Therefore, everyone
must participate, globally, to solve increasing energy demand and
supply laws.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Economically-technologically, freer
markets, without manipulative government favoritism, distributing
capital and spreading risk always love profitable innovations. They
also raise investment capital and spread the risk better, too, than
the state. States serve as the insurer of last resort. It does that
best, and does not belong, nor does it need to act, on the front end
of energy markets. Freer markets allocate resources and capital for
opportunity costs according to efficiency standards of a return on
investment made by profitable sales to consumers. In creating supply
for the demand of more energy, governments can best apply and
supervise rules of fairness, equability, and transparency to the
business of capital markets. If governments of the state get too
involved in mixing government monies with private financing, it
always leads to disastrous results.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Public-private cooperatives actually
define conditions of fascism, or socialism, or communism—whatever,
and none of these pose good conditions for individual freedom and
dignity. The profits of fascism or socialism, etc. only aggrandize
the state, at the expense of freedoms and beneficial results. Also, a
public-private consortium opens the doors for corruption and
inefficiency, or even suppression of innovation to the profit of the
inefficient industries. We have that now under the current system of
state-business collaboration. It does not work well. Try the freer
market approach, with individual and community initiatives, and the
result would look different than what failure so far has managed to
achieve.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In addition, as long as individual
consumer demands increase for more efficient energy usage, for the
so-called “greener” options, then the market will supply it. The
laws of nature and phsyics determine that. If the demand grows more,
the supply of “greener” solutions will also increase, as long as
the state does not have the opportunity to favor the corrupt and
inefficient suppliers to everyone's disadvantage. The principle works
for all products—electricity and gas, especially. If individual
choice remains intact, people can freely choose to buy or invest in
the kind and type of changes they want.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In the socially-technological aspect,
to preserve the balancing of all factors, like investment,
opportunity costs, costs and benefits of energy conversion, toward
better, and toward more efficient, and healthier energy and power
sources and results, a new mentality must enter the public awareness.
Primarily, humanity must ask the questions, “Do we really need to
have this product or service? Do we really want to spend energy
making it and operating it?” For example, does it make sense for
the world to suffer the cost of higher energy consumption just to get
a thinking kitchen appliance? A smarter, flashier phone? More
automobiles, even if electric? Answers can come as yes or no, or not
yes but not now. It absolutely must come down to whether something
saves energy and increases efficiency, to the why or why not do we
need to develop something just because we can, and because we look
brilliant doing it. If we apply this litmus test to all
modernization—everything we can build, make or do—it might
surprise us that we really do not need many of the things pointed by
trends now and into the future. While things may fascinate us, and
look shiny on top, almost every thing in society has a dirty
underside when it comes to energy and looking at the costs and the
benefits scales. Imagination offers us many opportunities for
increasing energy efficiency, but we must understand that no free
energy or free lunch exists. Until humans get out of their own
selfishness and the perceived birthright to consume unlimited amounts
of energy and energy resources, we might not overcome the challenges
ahead. If we still build frivolous material things and do frivolous
acts, we need only start planning graves in the future. How many?
Unsure. Why? From every danger of war and peaceful times that concern
energy in the future.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
This discussion leads directly to the
cultural-technological issue that will define the future of humanity,
and not only about energy. The biggest obstacle to future progress
about all energy conversion, clean power and climate change, economic
growth and prosperity, and even the evolution of civilization, stems
from humans blaming other people for problems without presenting
better alternatives. Nor do humans have great willingness to make
similar sacrifices for what they demand of others. Even your author
can convict himself of these general human tendencies.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The general solutions come along these
guidelines. First, NO ONE stands immune from this psycho-cultural
syndrome of blaming others. Self-responsibility and self-disciplined
ethics arrest this syndrome. Second, any solutions for energy
problems must come from the consent of everyone concerned,
peacefully, without coercion, in a unity of all to sacrifice
something for better results. Third, demanding that only one segment
of the population pay for changing how we use energy and produce
power, for any reason, must stop. (And stop on every other issue
before us). Whether rich or poor, we ALL must own the solution, and
everyone must pay a price, even in dollars. That price must come with
fairness, equability, and transparency.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
We all create the demand, we must all
supply the answers, even in dollar amounts. Fourth, and finally, we
must stop indulging in the waste of energy of all kinds, even human
energy misdirected into frivolous thinking and actions. The problems
of energy face us. They will not leave us. We must pay attention to
solving it, consciously, conscientiously, deliberately, and
energetically. Where we can eek out efficiency in energy conversion
and consumption, we must do so, while still maintaining individual
dignity and natural rights. If for no other reasons, it reduces the
power of the state to rule without restraints, and only for the
benefit of the privileged. To conclude this discussion, the clock
ticks. More ideas exist. We can think of more, too. Let's hear
others. But most of all, as people, we can think and act. For if we
unleash the imagination of humanity, the solutions will present
themselves. If we take ownership for our ideas and actions, we can
prove to history that we deserve the right to call ourselves
intelligent beings. We can save our future, and then exceed our
expectations.</div>
<br />Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-14125387579102928222020-05-22T02:59:00.001-05:002020-05-22T02:59:18.291-05:00The Future Yet Has Arrived<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Future Yet Has Arrived</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
By Tim Krenz</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
COVID-19 and the emergency measures
around it have accelerated the transitions started by the Information
Age decades ago. With the world wired-in and logged-on, the soft
quarantine in most states of the Union and other parts of the globe
have forced the world to adapt using technology as it exists today.
The quarantine, and the social isolation and distancing to prevent
COVID-19's spread have also pointed the way for new and upcoming, and
much needed, technologies to fill the spaces and gaps not now covered
in the technology architecture. Future technology and how humans use
it will continue to evolve.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
As we always must say, “Change
remains the only true constant in the universe.” Most people
working, if at all, remotely, at home, or in more isolated work
spaces; school terms shifting to remote, online coursework; home
entertainment via digital streaming; and more expansive on-line
shopping and home delivery; all these point the way to the future of
work, education, amusement, and commerce—toward the direction
information technology has always pointed us. If the COVID-19
emergency has done anything, it makes the opportunity presented by
the danger into the necessity of innovation. Nonetheless, some
choices remain, and a necessity for decision-making exists, in how we
use these opportunities to adapt to the technology, both current and
future. We mus set some priorities for these new tools and
techniques.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Despite how things have changed due to
COVID-19, even temporarily in some respects, some things have
remained, like food supply, as important as before the emergency.
People will still have to work, or labor, to create and distribute
food and even all other household necessities. How digital means,
including its use in the biological sciences, will assist feeding
civilization brings both promises and dangers. Where we see that
technology and its tools and applications can increase, secure, and
facilitate feeding people, it will happen. This includes everything
from creating better genetic strains of crops to more efficient
storage and transportation processes via digital tools. Where the
emergency shows shortcomings in these supply chains, technology and
those who innovate with it will fill those gaps.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Energy, and by implication
transportation, and even household machine controls, all can benefit
from increased efficiency, utility, and cost-to-benefit advantages.
The trend in business and engineering already point the way forward.
The necessities of filling the gaps and improving energy exploitation
and use as seen in the emergency will spur the innovations in untold,
and perhaps unexpected ways. COVID-19 influenced areas where energy
production, storage, price-point supports, and reduced pollution had
noticeable impacts. Again, long-term trends pointed the direction
for decades. COVID-19 merely gives impetus to rapidly advance
technology's uses to cover the exposed shortcomings. If nothing else,
the new ways and means of energy in this civilization will help
prepare for new emergencies.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
COVID-19 also created a direct line in
the new way employment can function in dispersed physical locations
and in on-line virtual networks. This, too, has profound implications
in commercial business, industrial production, urban development,
public transportation, and even the community design and construction
industries. Not only does COVID-19's effects impact the nature of
work and household types, locations, design and construction, it
also, as we clearly see, accelerated the trending changes in how
society educates its people. Everything associated with the
education industry—school construction, learning materials and
equipment, staffing expenses, and the very budgets, tuition, and
taxes that support schools, colleges, and universities can undergo
refinement, innovation, redesign, and rethinking. For education and
employment, the very topics and subjects, and the way of teaching
itself, may change after assessing the course and impact on education
of the emergency quarantine. As far as the general economy of the
United States and the world, the products, services, training, and
uses of employment and education will move faster toward the trend
lines have pointed the way for decades. COVID-19 now shows people
how, in this recent socially scientific mass experiment, it can work
and we can improve much in the future.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In the social-economic changes to come
inevitable with or without COVID-19 ever happening, we arrive at
perhaps the most critical changes that we can foresee, and the ones
with the most dangers and opportunities, in the cultural-political
areas of society.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
First, in the cultural sense, during
COVID-19, a new phrase entered the lexicon, called “social
distancing.” By separation in public, and keeping apart, we use
social distancing to stop or slow the spread of that virus by
limiting person-to-person contact and physical transmission. A
necessary measure, the social distancing must never become a cultural
distortioning, a human civilization whereby we limit physical contact
and disconnect ourselves emotionally, or withdraw fellowship,
friendship, concern or empathy, from others. Such a distortioning
could disengage people from mutual aid to others, stop recognizing
their political, economic, social and other lawful natural rights,
and cause even more division in society. At this stage of the
reopening of society after the quarantine, if we have learned
anything about the isolation, we should have learned that no matter
what technology or tools we have to maintain digital or even just
informational connection, people need human contact with each other.
We exist as social animals, and our civilization with whatever peace
it has cannot stand any more cultural disconnection than it already
has endured. Hopefully, COVID-19 teaches us a lesson that technology
cannot successfully cure everything in and by itself. Only by
working together, and recognizing that we need to work together, and
reconcile face-to-face, can the world survive future emergencies,
even far more deadly or catastrophic ones than COVID-19.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Finally, in the political realm, we
arrive at what could become the most important and critical of the
effects of the pandemic. This potential phenomenon draws a straight
line from the danger of cultural distortioning. Technology and its
tools and innovations will always advance and evolve. We will have
faster computing, more machine learning, near-sentient artificial
intelligence, more autonomous machines, more dispersed and even more
powerful and hyper-timed networks and connections. We can see it
happening now. We know it will happen faster and faster. But we must
use these things safely, and with foresight, in building them. Have
we installed safeguards and trapdoors to turn off or unplug
connections to preserve human dignity and natural rights?
Furthermore, do these materials and processes serve us or will they
or their controllers use us to serve them? We see the advantages of
having technology and new ways of adapting and innovating them to the
needs of civilization. Even if they present dangers of political
corruption or tyranny, we must ensure that the opportunities they
present at the edifice of a new era remain for the use of all,
equally, in liberty and dignity for the culture of humanity.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The COVID-19 emergency points to how
civilization can do things, if not better then more efficiently in
the coming years and decades. New things and new ways can add to the
collective safety, the survival envelope, and even the extensive
comfort of life on earth. Unless we know the “why?” we want to
change before we build the “what?” we would make a fatal error.
Many questions remain, even questions we do not know yet. But life
during COVID-19 at least can force us to ask, “What don't we know
about the consequences of what we plan to do?” Answering this
should assume the highest priority.</div>
<br />Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-44340071051614726542020-04-11T19:43:00.001-05:002020-04-11T19:43:28.488-05:00The Four Pillars of Future Progress: Part 2—Employment<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Four Pillars of Future Progress:
Part 2—Employment</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
By Tim Krenz</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
'For the <u>Hometown Gazette</u></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
April 5, 2020</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Throughout all history, the nature and
type of labor employment that people do changes. Called work, the
employment of personal time to a task necessary for subsistence and
investment will continue to change as civilization and technology,
and the needs and wants from them, always evolve. Why? How people
need and want to spend their productive and leisure time changes with
the work demands that labor (work) will have to supply. From
subsistence societies, like hunters and gatherers, to farmers,
herdsmen and cottage industries, to factory workers and commercial
services, as history changes those demands and expectations of
consumers change. Now, on the threshold of a truly digital and
connected era, including near-Artificial Intelligence (AI), demands
of consumers will change how they as employees fulfill both
expectations and requirements.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
On that bottom line, everyone wants
some things from their efforts, or need some things from the efforts
of other producers. Whether they want more disposable income for
material pleasures, or more leisure time like early retirement, or
employment that uses skills and education, or simply some type of
spiritual satisfaction from the fruits of their labor, these demands
of consumption and productivity need the supply of energy: Energy in
the form of harnessed and converted fuels (“capital” or kinetic
energy) and creative labor (“sweat equity” or potential energy).</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The types and opportunities for
employment need some thinking and planning to achieve. By that, I do
not mean centralized or government-directed planning, that type that
only offers enforced slavery or poverty on most, and a welfare for
the fewer rich as a goal. The last 100-plus years has seen the
failure through oppression, and the resulting brutality, of such
notions of centralized political-economic decision-making. By
planning, I simply mean looking at the criteria for renewing the
power of individuals to choose their own course, and to secure their
place in the market of ideas and labor. By freeing the process, but
ensuring the fairness and equability of it, freer markets return the
balance to where capital and workers cooperate to create
prosperities, and not waste its energies.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
A good plan for future employment must
utilize the educational skill sets of the work force, or actively
build those skill sets the future needs. (See “The Four Pillars of
Future Progress: Part 1—Education Determines Destiny” in the
previous issue of this paper). Second, a plan must build a fair and
equitable system for both the opportunity and the reward for the
willing and qualified workers. Without both empowerment and incentive
to pursue employment, the future of the world's prosperity looks
bleak. We must figure out a system going forward. This cannot fall
into the realm of predetermined outcomes, which do not necessarily
produce equality or fairness, as history shows. Policy or designed
outcomes only suppresses employees and dissipates efforts into
inefficient uses of capital (a form of kinetic energy) and rents on
capital (a form of potential energy). For when focusing energy inputs
on maximum outputs, energy in markets gets used efficiently, but also
conserves energy (again, potential energy) needed for capital
expansion.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Finally, a plan for future employment
must suit the economy that will exist later, the one that evolves in
free development, and not the false expectations of the past or
present one. Looking forward into the future, people cannot predict
exactly how that economy will look. (See part four of this series at
a later date). One can, on the other hand, forecast the types of
things it will need. While not necessarily designed by accident, a
future economy needs to focus less on the desirable whims of today's
fads, and more on the intelligent development of all facets of
progress—education, employment, energy, and economy. The economy,
to the extent that it responds to human influence, must take an
all-encompassing approach, but ultimately, as it evolves, and for
fairness and equability, it must utilize the freest supply and demand
functions possible within some limited constraints.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
This ultimately leads to the need to
address the four main groups in the current socio-economic system. On
the one hand, defying any label, the world has a group that sees work
as a requirement for the rewards of any fruits people get in the
world; some even with the “You don't work, you don't eat,” mantra
(I actually heard that phrase used once by someone at a political
meeting years ago). They see work as duty to self and want to impose
it, even if in inhumane slavery and starvation, on others. Another
group demands someone else's fruits must get shared with them, by
some type of unexplained right to theft through crime or legal theft
through tax policy. A third group, called <i>rentiers</i>, live on
the fruits of previous investments, whether stolen, granted, earned
or inherited. A fourth group, well, they fall in the cracks of those
who cannot work or work full-time, due to impairment or injury.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
How many people fall into each
classification? No one can really know, for different metrics and
analysis will all give different results. Regardless, these four
groups exist and co-exist in uncomfortable stress and tension. To the
surprise of all of them, none have a right to judge, and no one has
the right answer to either a right or wrong solution, other than they
have a right to their own opinion, property and personal choices.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Unfortunately, this tension and all the
counter-productive arguments prevent progress. How to address these
choices of right, property, equal access, and opportunity will become
the greatest fundamental problem to solve going forward into the
future. However, this problem remains one of political choice, and it
mostly exists in emotional and irrational resentment and jealousy.
Suffice it say, the choice to work and to choose what type of
employment to have, must all get ingrained in the system, beyond the
four requirements above (education, equal opportunities, risk/reward,
and a freer market) for any plan of future progress in employment.
Yet, no one wants to talk sensibly about the issue of those willing,
unwilling, unable, or unnecessary to employment in a traditional
sense of a job.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Eventually, societies will have to make
political-economic decisions about what people actually need, what
they hopefully want, and provide some system for providing the basic
access necessary under a fairness and equability doctrine. The world
just needs to remember two features that will keep the world
prosperous and at peace: That NO ONE has a right to steal property of
others or the common property, and, second, that governments can no
longer hold justly to a socialist-capitalist system (like that in the
United States) that merely provides capital welfare for the rich
(<i>rentiers</i>). This decision will happen, inevitably, whether or
not the future needs to supply less than full employment for the
demands of an evolving AI economy. Anything else just dissipates
energy, and wastes both capital and humanity (not to mention the
earth itself). Time will only tell.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In politics, as in economics, supply
will meet the demands created for it. Two options exists to plan for
the future of employment. One way uses centralized,
government-decision-making, where the population gets relegated to
stations, to all-encompassing stagnation, where the focus comes not
so much from the energy inputs (kinetic and potential energies), but
one of outcomes not wholly fair, equitable, just, nor satisfying to
anyone but those in control of the politics. This does nothing but
dissipate energy into unproductive uses or a form of economic (or
environmental) pollution (or corruption). The other way to plan
forward, uses the inputs themselves, the energy (“capital
resources=kinetic” and “creative labor=potential”), and lets
the supply of creative labor create the demand for consumption by all
the employed. I make one note here: “Real” wealth, like all
energy, never gets created or destroyed, it merely changes “hands”
or form. This way of free market moving forward, like gravity,
allows the efficient uses of the energy inputs to stronger results,
that satisfy the needs and wants, or the supply and demand, all of
which creates a more stable balance. And by stable balance, it can
translate into the political-economic decision-making that meets all
the criteria, especially choices, opportunities, risk/reward, and
freedom absent of oppression or even disguised and impoverished
slavery. A freer market for employment on these principles can also
maintain the checks and the balances of energy/wealth, and create a
safety net, and preserve access to entirely public goods and
services. For example: Take health-care: Why should good health go
only to those able and willing to pay blood money to get it?. Answer
that yourself. And this sounds complicated. But really, free markets
of supply and demand in employment work as simply as a neighborhood
lemonade stand run by kids. Remember that. In short, progress in any
human future can only happen when people can freely choose it, and
freely preserve it. Plan it now for yourself, and let the future
happen.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<br />Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-72075205944919071112020-03-23T10:41:00.001-05:002020-03-23T10:41:18.691-05:00Cepiaclub Corona Virus Report—USA Status March 23, 2020<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Cepia Club LLC</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
St. Croix Valley Region, Wisconsin</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Website: <span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.cepiaclub.com/">www.cepiaclub.com</a></u></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Email: <span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="mailto:hq@cepiaclub.com">hq@cepiaclub.com</a></u></span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Cepiaclub Corona Virus Report—USA
Status</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
March 23, 2020</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<u>Introduction</u>:</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
As of Monday morning, March 23<sup>nd</sup>,
00:38 HRS (CDT), the United States has 34,755 confirmed cases of
Corona Virus (COVID19),
(<span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/">https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/</a></u></span></span>
). In the lower 48 states, the fluid situation has a rapidly
increasing number of cities, counties and full states in some state
of emergency, like a shelter-in-place, or non-essential travel
restrictions, etc. Restricted population movements of any category
seek to reduce the random person-to-person spread of the virus. The
same fluidity of events and various population movement restrictions
holds also for the in excess of 144 countries world-wide known to
have the virus inside their borders. Before the opening bell of the
American financial markets, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA)
sets to open at 19,173.98. DJIA futures trading at 00:57 HRS (CDT)
set the market to open at -750 points.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<u>Events</u>:</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
During the US COVID19 task force
briefing at the White House on Sunday afternoon, March 22<sup>nd</sup>,
President Donald J. Trump announced the following:</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Three of the states with the highest
number of confirmed cases—New York, California and Washington—will
receive Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] reserve mobile
medical centers, with 4000 hospital beds between them, the largest
portion—2000 beds—going to the largest state by population,
California.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
USNS Mercy, a 1000-bed military
medical/hospital ship, will deploy this week to Port of Los Angeles,
CA. Mercy's sister ship, the USNS Comfort, currently in maintenance,
will deploy within three weeks somewhere along the East Coast.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
FEMA will distribute from reserve
stocks hundreds of thousands of pieces of medical gear, including
masks, gloves, respirators, medical containment suits, etc. to the
same three states in order to stem and contain the massive infection
rates located in them.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Also, the same three states either
have or shortly will have an approved Title 32 US Code use of
National Guard units for a declared natural disaster emergency. The
Title 32 provisions allows governors to mobilize, at Federal expense,
the National Guard units in support of anti-COVID19 operations.
President Trump declared that the National Guard would remain under
the command of the state governors, and that the expenses of
mobilization will come out of FEMA and, most probably, other
emergency funds. This amounts somewhat to a federalization of the
nation's citizens army in the three affected states, but under
command of governors working through the National Guard adjutant
generals in each state.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The federal government has released
food and other civilian supplies from the strategic reserve stocks to
certain affected areas, mentioning New York specifically.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In one of the most interesting
announcements at the briefing on Sunday, in order to fight the virus
and its effects, the president announced a new public-private
consortium of academic, commercial and government researchers AND the
assignment to the consortium of Department of Energy (DOE) computer
resources (without an exact description of which computers). Such
computers, with among the nation's most powerful and advanced located
with DOE, normally do research, testing, and servicing on civilian
and military nuclear power and the DOE's nuclear weapons program.
(The Department of Energy, by Federal statute, remains the sole
developer and government custodian of the nation's nuclear weapons
arsenal).</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<u>Analysis</u>:
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Cepiaclub's analysis of the briefing
announcements points toward several short term trends in the US
Government's response to COVID19 in the short term:</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Federal government will continue
to allow state authorities to enact emergency
measures—shelter-in-place, travel bans, or other restrictions—on
a decentralized level, according to assessment and needs.
Eventually, as the fluid situation has shown this week, such
restrictions will continue to spread across the country. This
incremental and state-by-stage approach, as we have seen in the past
six days, should lessen public panic and disorder by what amounts to
a self-and-voluntary quarantine of the majority of the country's
population.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Federal government will work as
the financial source and backstop for states and their use of
National Guard mobilized assets, and as a supply source for emergency
reserve stocks of medical centers and supplies, and civilian food and
supply distribution to the places with ultra-high and most critical
priority.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
FEMA will serve its statutory function
as the monitor, administrator and coordinator of the Federal
response, but working with the state authorities under the leadership
of their governors.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The state governors, as the executive
coordinators of their areas, will have full authority to use their
mobilized National Guard contingents, and those of neighboring states
under Title 32 USC, as auxiliary support to civilian government
workers, and to law enforcement and emergency services personnel.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Federal government has essentially
conceded a soft quarantine—led by the state and local authorities
themselves—by stages, lessening and easing public fears and rumors
of military (including National Guard) enforcement of public COVID19
emergency ordinances.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
With the Department of Energy
computers now redirected to the scientific front-line in, using
President Trump's language, a “war against the Corona Virus,” the
Federal government has essentially committed itself and some of its
most valuable scientific assets to a “war footing.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<u>End of Report</u></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-81019169413121837622020-03-15T22:46:00.001-05:002020-03-15T22:46:34.674-05:00Cepiaclub Coronavirus Meeting Discussions (Open-Source)<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Agenda—Cepiaclub Coronavirus Meeting
Discussions (Open-Source)</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
March 15, 2020</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Plans mean nothing; but planning
means everything.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Note: Meeting open discussion
format—use this handout for info and discussion. Ask Questions</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Welcome & Introductions (Tim)</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Ground rules: your choice of whether
to remain anonymous; uncensored discussion.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Cepiaclub: “Connecting people. . .
with community media.” Better info and action to public</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Trying to connect people to good info
to avoid fear and panic</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Create a template for anyone, anywhere
to use for calm & rational response to Coronavirus</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Director's Comments (Tim)</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
We want to freely discuss anyone's
ideas, concerns, issues, and options to create confidence</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Sharing this open-source material;
various media, including website</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Absolute need for people to cooperate
and unify; to create conditions for success</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Coronavirus Briefing (Coda)</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Background</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Points</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Isolation precaution procedures in the
home</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Situation Report</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Restricted travel to a full quarantine
almost a certainty</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Political-economic-social effects of
misinformation or distortion</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Fear</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Panic</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Disorder</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Extremism (violence, theft, &c)</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Principles of Cepiaclub's
template—safety-first</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Ensure our people</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Ensure our resources/supplies</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Ensure property</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Ensure values: peace and tolerance;
service and community</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Recommendations for a quarantine</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Create a “base camp” of family &
families—as much as space may support—MORALE</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Everyone contributes to work needed at
camp</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Apportion and share by agreement all
resources, fairly and equitably</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Begin rationing immediately on I-day
(Implementation of Quarantine, etc.) WASTE NOTHING</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Priorities for base camp or individual</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
First, bring and store as much food as
possible, undetermined length; clean water. Dry goods!!</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
(eat fresh or perishable foods first)</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Second, energy, fuels, etc.; necessary
tools, materials, for cooking, warmth, and repair</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Third, bring all medicines, first aid
supplies, prescriptions, vitamins, etc.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Fourth, Essential but minimal
essentials, for change of clothing, sleeping gear, morale</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
(Addressing means of personal
protection remain up to the individual and group comfort level</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Procedures for Base Camps</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Inventory everything, esp. food and
medicines, fuels</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Create a means of self-governing any
group. Appoint trusted leaders to different duties</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Agree on how to use foods, supplies,
energy. Give NO charity to others. Trade and barter</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
If needed, create isolation areas for
sick, if necessary</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Arrange accommodations for members for
members, sleeping, activity, work areas</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Devise a means of schedules for work,
security, chores, duties. Schedules improve efficiency</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Use time well and wisely, and try
keeping mood one of positive encouragement—MORALE</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Plan for the Immediate term</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
2 month quarantine or movement
restriction beyond base camp</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
2-3 month recovery process to rebuild
functioning supply chains and reconnection</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
6-12 months(??) worst case recovery,
with scarcities. Think gardening!! ETC. ETC.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Probable scenario for restrictions or
quarantine and short recovery period</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Electricity and gas companies should
still function</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Communications should still work—cell
towers, land telephones, radio, television.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Vital workers staying in health care,
emergency and police services, food transport, production</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Road blocks, checkpoints, no crossing
state boundaries without permits, city and village patrols</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
to control movement and regulate
public spaces</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA), primary administrator of public services</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Federal, state and municipal agencies
working to supply basic food deliveries, services, etc.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Limited, and by assignment, of
household times to do essential shopping or pickup and delivery</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Civil defense food rations
distribution points (limited stocks—6-8 months???)</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Mail services and postal delivery</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Protocols</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Establish communications with others,
make hard copies of contacts, family, friends, etc.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
CREATE NETWORKS OF YOUR OWN for trade
and barter and resupply chains.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Arrange on set days at set daylight
times a local market area after movement allowed</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Don't panic, stay calm, stay as
positive as you can, and don't do mean or stupid shit</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Start rebuilding faith and
perspective. Reflect on lessons learned about truly important things</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Four principles of Cepiaclub—we all
need to show leadership</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Take care of your people; use what you
have, wisely; focus on clarity, purpose and reality.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Follow me!” attitude</div>
<br />Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-38732951201741701532020-02-10T23:32:00.000-06:002020-02-10T23:32:10.767-06:00The Four Pillars of Future Progress: Part I—Education Determines Destiny<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Four Pillars of Future Progress:
Part I—Education Determines Destiny</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
By Tim Krenz</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
February 5, 2020</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Introduction: The future begins any
moment we want. In this third decade of the 21<sup>st</sup> Century,
we must begin to address how to adapt and evolve as a civilization.
The world starts to fundamentally change from 20<sup>th</sup> Century
norms of political-economics, and the social and cultural
relationships, that set previous standards of progress and use. The
new wave of technological development and the expansion and diffusion
of cultural opportunities make it imperative that we understand the
way ahead to get where we want to go—to a world of peace,
stability, prosperity, and tolerance. Without a map we can get pretty
lost. In this four part series on the pillars of future progress,
examining education, employment, energy, and environment might give
some hints on what we need to include on that treasure map to richer
and more satisfying living ahead. The map would allow surer success
and progress, for the future forward begins now. TJK.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Part I—Education Determines Destiny</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Nothing will determine the future of
humanity more than the development of the human mind matched with the
human spirit. And how the world views and develops both formal and
informal education will set the bar for success or failure as a
civilization. No one can make a more clear statement: education
determines destiny; for the world and for the individual.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
At any level of completion, an
education brings benefits along with it. Among those benefits, most
notably, education enhances the earning power over the life of a
degree holder, both males and females. Higher literacy rates among
children and adults bring nations and communities innumerable social
advantages, including less likelihood of later poverty, reduced
crime, and controlled birthrates. In countries where women receive
education, as opposed to where they do not, woman have stronger
claims to rights, more integration in economic life, and more career
options as fully vested members of their societies. All of these
advantages of an education apply world-wide. They all contribute to
inalienable good things for the world. And while expanded education
access costs people both tax money, tuition, and other expenses, what
the world invests in education, so can societies and individuals
receive returns on those investments.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
With a profound precedent on what a
nation can invest and receive from an education policy, two major
United States Government initiatives in the past 75 years increased
both the access to and the results from better education. These
initiatives accrued to the education industry itself and became
drivers of massive economic and technological growth. First, came the
original GI Bill, following the end of the Second World War in 1945,
giving veterans an option to attend colleges and universities with
tuition and other expenses paid as part of their benefits package
from service in the armed forces. The second initiative, following
the Soviet launch of the Sputnik space satellite, provided government
financing for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
education to stimulate the growth at all education levels of these
skills needed for fighting a very science-driven Cold War against the
Soviet Union. The first initiative, the GI Bill, took the character
of a vast social experiment, creating a different type of educated
society than existed prior to the war and the Great Depression. The
second initiative, the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958,
took the shape of a massive intellectual infrastructure development
that created the material tools of that new society. Both initiatives
used limited, rather focused inputs but produced out-sized high
outputs in technical and economic growth for the United States.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Both the original GI Bill and the NDEA
took different approaches toward social benefits. In the GI Bill, the
government merely paid for the education of its veterans as a reward
promised for service, something veterans earned. It did not guarantee
the success of the veteran-student. It rested on the veteran-students
to succeed or fail. In the NDEA of 1958, the US Government narrowed
the focus of that investment for a desired result, i.e. the skills
needed by the country to prosecute a war as highly technically driven
as ideological-philosophically driven. It did not blindly fund all
areas of education (most, but not all, directed at the sciences and
technical applications). Yes, both programs had costs and benefits,
with causes and effects specific to their intent. In both cases, the
US Government took a low-risk investment, one unlikely to fail
considering the offers and the consequences. The perfect storm of
these initiatives, unlikely to recur, have become the standard of the
success of 20<sup>th</sup> Century education in the United States.
Noble causes? Possibly. Successful? Certainly. Repeatable? Unlikely.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In the 21<sup>st</sup> Century, we face
an entirely different problem with education. Beside the larger
problem of cost, and the moral hazard of who should pay for it—the
government or the students—the primary challenge has become one of
“why get a college or university degree? What do we hope to gain
from a degree as a graduate? as a society? A better paying job? Or
some national asset worth the investment?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Education will determine the destiny of
individuals and nations not just because education brings those
desired financial and social benefits, and not just what we can get
out of it for ourselves, but because of what we will need education
to do in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century. We need modern education not so
much to figure out questions of career opportunities, how to engineer
better things, or create more clever junk. We need to focus education
on figuring out not so much the answers at first, but in order to ask
the correct questions about ourselves and our place in the universe.
For example, the GI Bill educated educators, leaders, innovators, and
even bureaucrats. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 educated
people who went on to build computers, missiles, bombs, and
spaceflight. But that begs the question: How many of those students
from those programs ever asked, “Why do we need a society of middle
managers? Why do we need to build more hydrogen bombs?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Today, and in the future, we need
education to teach us how to think beyond the limits of ourselves and
not just how to personally profit financially. Although the latter
part about profiting financially needs to remain, more important
things need to take precedence. Education needs to become the
starting point for a very personal and very moral and intellectual
investigation into the purpose behind things, including ourselves and
others. We need education to help us answer, not “how can I build
better customers, better machines, more intelligent software,” but
start answering the bigger questions: “Should we do this? Why do we
need to build this clever junk? What value do I have beyond a better,
more obedient worker in a vast machine of cogs?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Education should absolutely help us
answer the questions: “Who am I and why do I live on this earth?
How can I help serve myself and the world at the same time?”
Fortunately, not all answers have to come through pricey schools. It
does not hurt to have them or their degrees as background. Yet, a
degree should only start the investigation, not end it. We have
found out we can learn numbers, shapes, and how to build gadgets.
That comes easier than what we need to ask. “What does my life mean
and did I do well with what I learned, in the service for the higher
good?” We would have wasted a life-time of education if we cannot
answer that positively by the end. The future can begin any time we
want. Start asking and start learning, and start living!</div>
<br />Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-23798876302061363572019-12-06T08:47:00.002-06:002019-12-06T08:47:50.416-06:00The Critique of Politics #10: Party of One—Self-activism and Saving Humanity<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Critique of Politics #10: Party of
One—Self-activism and Saving Humanity</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
By Tim Krenz</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
For the Hometown Gazette</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
December 6, 2019</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
We live in a complex age. And like all
ages, the complexity only increases, especially in the politics. As
in most things in life, politics inevitably multiplies the questions
we should ask. Furthermore, people need to know the type of questions
to ask, first, before trying to answer anything. I have a question,
to start this essay: “How can the United States of America stay
free and united, with the most liberty for everyone, protecting all
forms of their property, while eliminating the threat or use of force
or other coercion that would cause violence and destruction?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Complex times, and direct questions,
require simple answers. In this tenth critique of politics, we will
examine the different consequences looming of not satisfactorily
answering the question above, and then exploring how rather average
individuals hold the key to solving most political problems. In
looking at plain people and their ability, we shun any reliance on a
leader, a political organization, or a party or a faction. The United
States, not too surprisingly, stands at a cross roads, an
intersection between its fate as a major power in the world,
vis-a-vis China and its clients, and in its form as a republic under
a constitution and laws, and in the place of democracy in the future
world. We require everyone, every citizen, to bring their
convictions, their ethics, their decisions, and their actions in the
civic realm. And every citizen must play its role not in a
conventional and passive participation of voting on occasion, as it
suits them. For the change needed must involve everyone, as
individuals.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Several catastrophes or combinations of
them, could cause fatal ruptures in the political future of the US: A
breakdown of the shared structure of powers, between state and
central federal authorities; a massive credit and finance collapse,
including sovereign debt repudiation; famine, resulting from any
number of environmental and economic catalysts; civil disturbance or
insurrection following an election, or another event of unintended
consequences; a war somewhere involving the US, which might include
nuclear weapons; an epidemic of natural or weaponized origin. Even if
seemingly improbable, these events all hold the realm of the
possible. All the above events, however, can cause immense harm,
especially without a unified populace working together to eliminate
the danger, mitigate their effects, or recover in their aftermath. In
a complex age, unexpected events also happen. A nation plans for
these and other possibilities. But who, actually, suffer them? The
very same population that allows the worse of their nightmares to
come true, if only from the ignorance and apathy of how their
division and hatreds make all things worse—past, present, and
future.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The greatest weakness in the current
politics comes from the two things people in our connected age seem
to hate to do: Staying quiet long enough to listen to others, and
second, having to calmly discuss their differences with people
opposed to them. In more than one way, listening skills and
person-to-person conversations of depth and breadth, both hold the
key to answering the question of this essay: “How can the United
States of America stay free and united, with the most liberty for
everyone, protecting all forms of their property, while eliminating
the threat or use of force or other coercion that would cause
violence and destruction?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Most often, people want the government
or political factions to solve their problems, in their rather
graceless forms as a bad acting troupe dance at a theater of absurd
egos. We should have never relied on them. We should never now or
again. For in the case of listening and dialog, as President Reagan
would have said, “Government IS the problem.” The solution relies
on principle, and effort, by the individuals and not on a government
creating a task force or spending money it does not have. The core
foundation of the listening and dialog starts at the bottom rung of
civics: Where you sit marks where you will have to make your stand.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
How? As implied above, we live in a
complex age and one that seems to talk loud, chatter aimlessly, and
voice its indignation at others (especially those in opposition).
And, after a length of a short time, that just becomes so much more
like noise—a dull, deafening hum, directed at people, and done so
forcefully to make them submit. If we diagnose this political disease
correctly, without immunity by anyone, we might call it more of a
listening problem, a debility to want to hear ourselves talk instead
of learning what other might know or wonder. But this civic deafness
comes NOT in not hearing other people's opinions. For after all, the
opinions make that dull static. What exactly do we not hear? Of what
do we not hear enough? Simply, in this complex age, like any complex
age, we do not hear the questions that need asking. Without those, we
never arrive at the bigger issue of understanding the real questions
we need to ask.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In suffering this breakdown in
conversation and the art of listening, the division of opinions only
increase into more groups that political elites, business giants,
social icons, and cultural manipulators can more easily manage to
their own, exclusive and profitable advantage. Never mind answers,
yet. The questions matter more at this stage. Mine in refrain: “How
can the United States of America stay free and united, with the most
liberty for everyone, protecting all forms of their property, while
eliminating the threat or use of force or other coercion that would
cause violence and destruction?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
When Herodotus, the ancient Greek,
invented the discipline of history, he labeled it “historia,”
partly meaning “inquiry.”And later in ancient Greece, Socrates
(brought to us via the writings of Plato) rarely offered opinions in
his dialog with numerous pretenders and sophists. Instead, he asked
questions of them to narrow down their meanings and beliefs. Shame on
those fools who would not stand up to scrutiny. Inter-personal
conversation, not any super-media, might make questioning and
listening, listening and questioning, the better media for
understanding things, especially in the age of complexity. Instead of
groups of political-opinionated people preaching to and
congratulating each other, perhaps they should approach opposing
groups and ask some rather simple questions and then actually listen.
They can demand the same courtesy. The questions might come out like
this:</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“What do you need to happen which we
can give you, provided you give us what we need? What do you want
from us that we can deliver for a trade from you? If we do this for
you, what can you do for us? Can we agree to live together, unified
and in peace, or go our own ways, in peace?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
This type of asking questions and
listening to the answers, not by politicians but by real people who
have to abide by the process, or suffer the consequences, might find
common ground. And honestly, it might not. At least then, the little
differences between real people (NOT political, business, social, and
cultural elites) get narrowed and settled where they can. The dialog,
the conversation itself, might reveal more similarity of our plight
than otherwise thought. At least, it begins the one thing all
individuals need: To identify that elites have little in common with
them, at the core of convictions and actions. Common people have
common problems. Elites identify with each other. And, in the end, if
the individual to individual or group to group dialog solves nothing
else, it solves the question of how to disagree amicably and they
might find a way of living peacefully despite the division. No one
knows until they have the courage of their own knowledge by asking
the very, very hard question of consciousness: What do I believe and
why?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
This process of each person simply
becoming a party of themselves in the mix of the complex age might
seem unlikely now. It can get done. And it must, and inquiry and its
history can then continue.</div>
<br />Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-10606275726893522962019-11-25T01:04:00.002-06:002019-11-25T01:04:22.106-06:00Critique of Politics #9: The Opinion Complex and the Revolt by Self-Awareness<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Critique of Politics #9: The Opinion
Complex and the Revolt by Self-Awareness</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Tim Krenz</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Revised: November 25, 2019</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
For Hometown Gazette</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Copyright (c) 2019 The Cepia Club LLC</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
No state can exist without the support
of its people. No government can function without the consent of its
citizens. Buttressing that support and consent depends on personal
opinion. In politics, opinions mean everything, because ultimately
opinions determine decision-making, by the individual, a factional
group, and the leadership class. What we chose to believe, even
notwithstanding facts or contrary to that belief, or the proportion
of good or bad a belief may cause, those beliefs affect actions,
policy, and the very realities of politics with which we must contend
in the future. Change can happen, peacefully at that, if everyone
sees things more clearly, associates with facts, and acts on the gift
of thinking.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
How people form their own opinion
depends a great deal on experiences, sources, environments, and
expectations. And whether people make wise or poor decisions reflects
a process of rational minds and emotional appeals. Having made these
statements implies no prejudice for or against anyone's
opinion-making and decisions. Political (and economic) decisions
just get made that way—no matter how rational we think we make
choices or how deluded we think other people might make their own.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
But, we must understand some very
fundamental points about political opinions, choices,
decision-making, and their effects. First, no one person has all
omniscient knowledge about everything—especially about politics.
Second, no one has a perfect solution to everything or even anything
in the political-economy. Third, no one has any opinion of any real
value to other people, whether benign or helpful. We cannot choose
what others think. Fourth, we all have imperfect opinions at the
beginning and at the end of all political discussions, and therefore,
we all make less than perfect political choices—in every instance
and no matter what(!).</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Why should we accept these four points?
Because all political decisions ultimately involve trades with the
less than ideal circumstances. Furthermore, the inherent nature of
political (and economic power) forces others to live according to the
standards and dictates of others, often by the coercion, force,
theft, and violence of the state and its government. These four
deadly sins of politics eventually make the power of the state and
the governing apparatus of states unsustainable. If so, and if
nature's god has justice, then centralized and enforced politics made
from the top to the lowest denominator can have no place in the
future if the world and its inhabitants want peace, prosperity,
protection, and property. Therefore, within the bounds and norms of
behavior, and in the normative range of political terms of debate, we
will proceed to explore the nature of the state and of governments,
and why the potential of individual opinions can change everything
wrong in the present with a promising future if the world takes
action.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
As stated above, no state can exist
without the support of its people. No government can function without
the consent of its citizens. To define these terms, we call a state
that which encompasses the territory and population of a country, one
subject to or even in submission to the rules of the sovereign. In
the United States of America, the state operates as a federal power,
with powers shared by the central and the subsidiary states. The
state has such dominion over its land and people, and the arrangement
of powers between the center and the other states regulate and even
define the political-economic relationships of the people and their
interests. In these United States, the confederal state originated
from Declaration of Independence in 1776, and became federal in 1789
with the implementation of the constitution. With the 1787 written
constitution, the people as a whole hold the sovereignty, a form of
ultimate power, authority, and legitimacy. Because of this, we call
the United States a republic. (For example, a monarchy places the
sovereignty in a king, a queen, or a prince of some kind—the
opposite of a republic. Also, a group of states, like the original
thirteen, held the sovereignty both individually and collectively
under the articles of Confederation—hence the union of states).</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
When we define a government, we mean
that sort of institutional resolution of processes, rules,
regulations, and laws, for managing the affairs on behalf of the
state, primarily a state's financial collections, management and
payments, of and for the people under its control. Ideally,
governments take under its care the civil order and protection of
those it considers citizens. The state and its people give
governments—whether elected, appointed, or assumed—the power to
function on its behalf. This power represents the concentration or
even the factional competition of groups of individuals behind common
goals. Many different systems of government exist, and each operate
according to its own rules. In the United States of America, the
government of federalism comes from a written and amended
constitution. It uses a system of elections of ballots cast by
qualified electors. Hence, we call this system of government a
democracy, even if we define the state as a republic. These terms,
while exclusive of each other, do not contradict themselves. Even a
country with a monarchy, like Great Britain, functions as a
democracy, albeit with an unwritten constitution.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
States and governments require one
thing each more than any other to function: Legitimacy to call it a
state and the consent of the people for governing it. When rulers of
a state or leaders of a government fail to protect their people, or
oppress them or abuse or murder them, people have revolted, in some
ways peacefully and in other ways violently. This rebellion against
the sovereign state or the institution of government has happened in
significant times and in significant countries: in North America in
the eighteenth century, France also then, and many times later, and
Russia twice in the twentieth century.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Loyalty supports a state, if that state
does its land and people good. Popular opinion supports governments
when governments perform competently. Remove any benign the natures
of the state, and if governments manage badly, then people and
citizens change them. It takes enough people, of a common opinion,
whether an opinion that does good or creates mischief, to withdraw
their endorsement from the state and from the government to bring a
better condition of state (or no state) and a better, more responsive
government.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In a republic that practices democracy,
opinion matters. So often in modern times, with the nature of time,
the media, distraction, greed, fear, and misinformation, the
differences of opinion make for disorder and disunity—indeed a
general weakness of the body politic. Remember the four sins of
political opinion above? It takes a broad aggregate of a large
sampling of opinion to find the common denominator in a political
policy or action. But such common points of reference exist—even
today. We must always watch for those vendors of hate on both sides
of the two-party question. On television, on social media, and in
public places, many leaders of social, cultural, economic and
political organizations want to influence other people's opinions,
and by default keep themselves in control by controlling options and
what they want people to hear, see, believe, and choose between only
two sides.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
A society that recognizes only elite
opinion-makers sows its own seeds of self-destruction. I ask readers
to remain skeptical of everything in the world of politics, this
article included. Question anything and everything. Forming an
opinion takes work and an effort to discern the reality, and not just
casual glances at feeders, headers, headlines, and titles. And what
could we do with enough people making better opinions, not adopting
someone else's opinion, and coming to clearer conclusions? We could
very well withdraw legitimacy from the failing state and withdraw
support from the government that serves elite interest. We can do
better without the force, fraud, coercion and violence they need to
exercise to stay in control. Opinions matter. Inform yours more
rigorously. Then, ACT on it.</div>
<br />Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-51124309465800700802019-07-30T05:01:00.001-05:002019-07-30T05:01:46.372-05:00Critique of Politics #8: Diversions and Wedging—Civil Discord and the Moral Bankruptcy of States<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Critique of Politics #8: Diversions and
Wedging—Civil Discord and the Moral Bankruptcy of States</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
By Tim Krenz</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
For: Hometown Gazette</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
July 30, 2019</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Anyone who owns any kind of power has
one goal before all others: Hold on to that power! The nature of that
power contains within it the power to make choices, for self or for
others, depending on the nature of the system. If humans submit to
the laws of nature and of nature's god, then the liberty to choose
among a larger range of alternatives translates into a higher and
wider scope of liberty for the most people. Hence, the freest and
widest choices available for as many citizens as possible means a
much freer civil society than if only one person or a few of them
made all the decisions for others. The more liberty for individuals
to choose has usually meant a more just, and a wiser, system of
government within which all must live together.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Of the same coin, powers for a leader
or powers for the masses of individuals come with very definite
responsibilities for that gift of liberty in nature's laws. Those
duties include: to do good for the most people at the same time; to
protect from any harm whatsoever the young, the old, the sick, and
the infirm, and all who cannot protect themselves; to allow others
the same freedoms, liberty, and choices one demands for oneself; and
to assert and defend the principles of one's own sense of right and
wrong for the benefit of the whole society. Failing any of these
measures of duty for a stable, free, just and enduring public trust,
then that civil society cannot last long as a free, self-governing
system for all citizens. In that case, the society becomes the
playground of the few most powerful at the expense of the rest.
Furthermore, ignoring any of these requirements a free society needs
to cope and manage conflicts and change, then that failed experiment
in free society will face its own, and terminal, moral bankruptcy.
That society will collapse swiftly, dangerously, violently, and
indefinitely.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
With the ambitions to maintain control
of political power while delaying the mass recognition of moral
bankruptcy in the society, diverting and dividing the public becomes
the single most effective and efficient means for leaders to extend
the fiction of both their control over events and the solvency of
their rule.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Almost everyone may have heard of
“panem et circenses,” the Latin phrase for “bread and
circuses.” Roman rulers of the patrician and Praetorian ranks gave
the plebians (the masses) subsidized grain for cheap bread and plenty
of addicting entertainment. Keeping bellies full and distracting the
public's attention from critical issues and events worked until the
shatteringly swift collapse of the Western Roman Empire as a coherent
entity. The breads and circuses diverted the attention from the
internal decay, with grain and games itself part of the decay
encouraging the ignorance and apathy of the public.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Romans and their Byzantine brothers
in the Eastern Empire also used a policy of “divide et impera,”
or “divide and rule” or “divide and conquer.” In this logical
construction of the foreign and domestic policies of the great
political powers, rulers keep the enemy (the competition), and even
their own subjects and citizens in constant conflict between each
other. This leaves the opposition weak and the ruling power(s)
stronger. Rulers know that if the opponents of any institution or
party ever unified by common ideals or alliances of convenience, the
power that rules or the elite few that support them would have a more
difficult time defending or justifying their reign of power. At that
stage, like France at the beginning of their revolutionary and
Napoleonic eras, the ancient regimes of the old power(s) would
collapse, suddenly, due to their moral bankruptcy.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
With diversions, modern nation states
bring updated and sophisticated breads and circuses to their heights.
Anything to distract the public works to the advantage of the power
that rules. The Nazis in Germany named Joseph Goebbels' grand
institution the Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and
Propaganda for very sound reasons—effectiveness and efficiency. The
ministry both diverted attention from Nazis crimes against people and
kept the Nazi faithful followers supportive, and eventually
complicit, in those very same crimes. Now the world even surpasses
the Twentieth Century's superlative tool of diversion, the
television, with the combined effects of the near-instant internet,
massive free content, and, ironically, subscribed on-demand
programming.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Modern politics with weapons of mass
manipulation refines the divide and rule/conquer methods of old.
While chipping away at the legal means and ethical standards of moral
dissent, and with a promotion of a mass conformity, a new, partly
voluntary coercion of the public trust has crept into political
dialog. This silent bomb in a very quiet war of dividing nations uses
the “wedge” weapons in the modern divide et impera. The wedging
principle used by influential institutions forms two distinct groups,
neither willingly powerful enough to displace the other, but both
benefiting from the absence of other choices that could undermine the
two dominant factions. It has drawn distinct lines, defining one side
and the other. More options would weaken the two ruling sides,
because the third or other choices could shift some alliances of
principle or interests. Oddly, and truly, the leaders of two sides
have more in common with each other than they do with the rank and
file members of their factions.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Wedging issues abound. Look near and
far, and a thoughtful, critical, open-minded citizen can see it. Some
of the more obvious ones: abortion, immigration, private firearms,
socialism versus capitalism, liberalism or conservatism, force versus
sanctions, war versus diplomacy, the struggle with Islam (and over
Israel), and the many-sided problems of race, sex, religion, income,
age, and health discrimination. These wedge issues exist not just in
North America, but world-wide. It has become all too convenient for
rulers everywhere to have such neat piles on each side. Why?
Effectiveness and efficiency.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Maintaining diversions and sustaining
wedges in the public—and avoiding deeper examinations of motives
and consequences—creates a far too dangerous situation for a free
society to survive with ease. Drawing lines pushes all but the rulers
into an “Us or Them” mentality. Really, the issue should come
down to “We!”: United, for freedom of conscience, freedom of
speech, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. With a “WE”
identity, the rulers can rightfully become the “THEY” who oppress
and steal our liberty of self and our choices!</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Can a society self-govern itself,
without a few who think they should make our choices for the mass
majority? How well has self-government ever before worked? The people
of the world and all nations have choices to make. The problems will
not leave on their own account. Neither will the manipulations of
leaders to stay in power for themselves change much unless something
drastic happens. When it happens, if it does, indeed, it will come
suddenly, brutally, and at great cost.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The present dilemma exists because
people take too much of their own opinion too seriously, (like
myself) and fail to understand that politics, governing, liberty, and
the future of humankind do not have clean and neat answers.
Democracy, that great last hope for the American republic to resolve
its differences, allows citizens to reconcile and cooperate, to
manage a peaceful resolution of conflict and change. Unfortunately,
people forget or just resent the fact that other people get to vote,
too. Voting, a choice made, preserves liberty, especially when the
losing side has incentive to remain loyal in opposition. A winner who
wants to take all will end up taking all liberty from everyone,
except from themselves. Stay forewarned. And hold on to your power!
WE need it.</div>
<br />Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-76078279291023820142019-07-10T01:16:00.002-05:002019-07-10T01:16:39.216-05:00Sub Terra Vita: Chronicle #55: My Valley, My County—Revisited<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Sub Terra Vita:
Chronicle #55: My Valley, My County—Revisited</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
By Tim Krenz</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
January 31, 2019</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
For NormalcyMag</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
“My valley, my
country!” I exclaimed in the first of these chronicles in Sub Terra
Vita, my “underground life.” What did I mean then by “my
valley, my country?” Does my meaning remain valid? What does it
mean to me now?</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In writing these
sketches and mini-memoirs, I talk throughout of those personal
experiences and stories of life here, the living stage drama of the
St. Croix Valley. In my spirit, the topics grounded themselves upon
the influences of my family and its heritage, my friends, my
surroundings, and the meandering that shaped my own life and formed
the hidden histories that abound in this homeland—my valley, my
country.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I feel, deeply, a
duty to share, reflect and expound on them. I know some stories and
they should say things that help others to understand the people and
place we call home. With perhaps too much pride, I mentioned in the
first chronicle of having a direct family lineage in the St. Croix
Valley going back nearly one hundred and fifty years. My great-great
grandfather homesteaded in the East Farmington area just south of
Osceola. However, even as a fifth generation descendant to this land,
I claim no propriety over the valley's story but only as it extends
over my personal life—seeing it, hearing it, touching it, trying to
understand it.</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Many families, past
and now, have put frustration, blood, tears, sweat and loved ones
into this ground. These underground life chronicles try to honor
those peoples. May they continue to do so, as we live toward the
future today. Because of these reasons, “my valley, my country,”
meant a spiritual kinship with the valley, one that only seeks to
nurture all and not demean anyone or anything. For this, my statement
remains valid. I care about my home, my homeland in Western Wisconsin
, the valley of the St. Croix River.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Moving onward, what
does “my valley, my country” mean to me now? Times change and
time changes. Things have to evolve, and so does our perspective.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Along with the
oldness of the St. Croix Valley, new people and their families have
come. Whereas the passing of time regenerates the soil when nurtured
and fed with the old things that expire, new people, new ideas, new
ways, new forms can bring an invigorating and creative tension that
allows a vibrant life to flourish. The values of the old things here
complement with traditions and customs the new innovations and the
growth of the modern world. Indeed, without the wise mix of the old
added to the new, unstable relationships between people, and between
them and the material, creates turmoil and destructive tendencies
beneficial to no one. Without the creative, positive tension in the
process of renewal, the valley would wither and die by staleness and
depletion. After that, it would snuff itself and its value to the
world by becoming the opposite of a home, just a place without
character. As residents who need to care, we can not accept the wrong
alternatives. It seems better to focus and work toward the positives.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I care about my
home, my homeland, in this corner of the world. Because we all should
care, we must contribute good, inclusive ideas and by our deeds
preserve responsibly the things that make the valley of the St. Croix
River more than just a place to rest and run. We need to keep and
improve it as a home for us, now and for later. When I started
writing the Sub Terra Vita Chronicles four years ago, I intended to
explain the past formed by my memory. “My valley, my country,”
meant that I recognize my debts to others who lived or passed this
way. They gave me a vibrant, comfortable homeland in which to live.
I still seek only to share my experiences, but in this chronicle I
would like to see how my experiences going forward may take shape.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
“My valley, my
country,” remains my mantra for now. A mix of customs and
traditions survive but the new and interesting developments should
stay relevant. Times change. Physical developments change with them.
If traditions pass, culture remains based upon and growing from them.
A culture provides the bedrock of sanity and values, and stability,
in the change of time and appearance. Like bedrock, like strong
personal principles and character, culture grips to the land and
water and how people use them. We grow from the experience.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In a land and water,
indisputably one symbiotic whole anywhere, we have connections to
past, present and future. Both land and water as one and the people
and habits the other, all combine to improve if we have the willing
effort to grow healthy. We must recognize these attributes—land,
water, people, and culture—as one indivisible and undivided whole
of the St. Croix Valley. We must recognize our common interest and
the multiple denominators as the single, whole, indeed absolute ONE.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The St. Croix River
may divide two states, Wisconsin and Minnesota. In spite of that, it
impresses all people on both sides of the water with the strong
physical reality, and with an almost spiritual bond of history,
commerce, fun, and recollections. The course of the river flows like
a spine, the nerves to the stem of our consciousness about both its
presence and meaning. It has a pure beauty itself, even farther north
upriver. Without realizing it, the river provides our reason for life
here, even if we remain unconscious of that fact. It has immense
kinetic power. The river, though, keeps its own sacred secrets, too.
In it meanderings, ever changing its course and barriers by erosion
and time's hard pounding science, the St. Croix River's life has its
own reasons perhaps unknown to us. It can make comedy in our memory.
It has, also, sadly too often brought tragedy as well. That defines
its pure power in a non-human, almost mystical form.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Luckily, the
national scenic riverway recognizes its sanctity and works volumes of
near-magic in spells to keep it purer, cleaner, healthier, and usable
beyond most other modern waterways. Without the river we would posses
no valley from which to draw its life blood of good water. With the
river, children and adults who grow up here had many rites of
passage, from canoeing, camping, boating, fishing, swimming; from
viewing the expanse from high rock cliffs; from sitting on sand bars
exposed when the electricity generating dam in St. Croix Falls slows
its discharge. The fun, if respecting the river's power, gives great
hope. If not respected, as we tragically re-learn often, it can also
take dreams away. These powers give the river the stories of our
lives here.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
As a kid in Osceola,
Wisconsin, born at the old hospital on the top of the bluff
overlooking the river, I have always had attachments to that water,
and definitely to the land around it. My friends and I, even with my
family, spent incalculable time on the St. Croix River. We swam, we
paddled, we motored, we camped, we jumped (luckily, no one died—many
others have), we explored, and we grew. On its edges of land above,
on the islands in the coursing stream, on the backwaters, in the
swamps, on its bridges, and in the water itself, we learned to
respect it, for its massive effects and for its dangers. We saw its
characteristics, its curiosities, and its scars made by human misuse.
The St. Croix River, like the entire valley, has its nooks, corners,
its concealments—everywhere. Wiser minds took precautions to help
the river survive long ago. Today, we benefit from that.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
By neutral intent,
the river offers no malicious motive to humans or animals. As people
who live here or who visit our land and water, we all get to enjoy
it. Treat the waters and the land around it well, and the stories
grow. Misuse them, hurt them, taunt it with acts of stupidity,
carelessness, irresponsibility, or deliberate abuse, and the river
will haunt us in the future.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In many ways, both
good and bad, the St. Croix River treats its guest and the valley's
children with the fate that timing, chance, purpose, or accident
calls our odds. This fact holds true for lifetimes. It holds true
each season. The river's character possesses qualities neither demon
nor deity. It will continue to arbitrate the destiny of all of us in
some way. Like any home, the valley around the river ties into those
odds of fates. It stays true, never false. It will stay true as long
as we treat life here true and never falsely.</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The surrounding land
in the St. Croix Valley feeds all the watersheds to the St. Croix
River itself, so the water and land hold the present life and the
future destiny of this homeland. “My valley, my country.” The
common connectors of land, water, people, and culture, move forward.
This forward movement needs to keep the St. Croix River as the key to
the narrative we will write. We need the river to enjoy this place
fully. Therefore, we should keep always in our mind and spirit this
link of our past, the now, and the coming time. Keeping the story
strong, we can keep this place a good home.</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The river and the
watersheds that feed it give a custom and tradition to carry forward.
On the other hand, how many people actually know their home well?
Regardless of other places we can visit and see, we all need and
should want to know our home better. I challenge everyone, the old
and the young, to explore and experience this place, this valley,
this country. See it, live it, think of it, absorb it into the memory
and the sense. Realize what this place means, and why we want it to
grow better while still keeping the values of the old. All of the
valley's nervous system; the creeks, the hills, the big ridge line,
the old farms, the old ruins, the new buildings, the appropriate way
to renew the community, all provide a body for our consciousness.
All things here must connect.
</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Use the opportunity
to know it wisely. Use it in peace, and share the story. Only in this
way can we preserve the narrative of our times, enrich our lives, and
learn that we all must consider ourselves neighbors who can get along
together. The commons of the St. Croix River give us that life-saving
opportunity, to unite around our wonder, and not divide over the
irrelevancies.</div>
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</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Building the story
with a common language of our culture here in my valley, my country,
we can grow and transition to even better achievements. We will meet
the future with the confidence of moral gain and not the fears and
uncertainties of material addictions. We can only go about the future
smartly if we know the facts and even the inspiring myths of
ourselves as people of the vallley, and of our home as land and
water. We can meet the future as ONE.</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
What does “my
valley, my country,” mean to me now? It means living prosperously
in every sense of the words. It means a shared understanding with my
neighbors of what we have at stake. Yet, now it moves beyond me. To
me, it truthfully becomes, “Our Valley, our Country!”</div>
<br />Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-35160857564542655332019-07-10T01:14:00.002-05:002019-07-10T01:14:21.946-05:00Low Adventures: Trekking the Superior Hiking Trail #9: Kennedy Creek and a Little Light in Overthinking the Weight<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Low Adventures: Trekking the Superior
Hiking Trail #9: Kennedy Creek and a Little Light in Overthinking the
Weight</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
By Tim Krenz</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
February 8, 2019</div>
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</div>
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In our numerous trips to the Superior
Hiking Trail in northeast Minnesota, Craig and I made great
adventures, but we also competed. While we walked the same distances,
climbed the same hills, and usually did the walking one of us close
behind the other, the competition between us centered around which
one of us carried less weight in his backpack. I always lost that
race to the lightest weight.</div>
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</div>
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In our next trip to the trail near the
shore of the giant Lake Superior, the stifling, steaming heat of that
second weekend of July 2005 afforded us the opportunity to cut
massive amounts of weight from both our bags. With daytime
temperatures that weekend in the high ninety degrees (F) range, we
would need no heavy sleeping bags, and no massive coats and sweaters.
I thought I had learned the lesson of the appropriate clothing to
carry on a much earlier trip. For a one night walk from south to
north on a section of trail to Kennedy Creek, we would not even bring
complicated camping gear like cook kits. All these factors had their
advantages, for both of us, even if my quest to carry less than Craig
turned out more discomfiting over the course of the one night.</div>
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</div>
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The day before our trip, on a Friday
afternoon at my house in Amery, Wisconsin, I had to move some things
in a closet to access some of my gear for the trip. In a far too
complicated sequence of events to explain here, I picked up a short
but full, and heavy, filing cabinet. I heard a crack and I felt a rip
pull me in my back. Well, I thought I put the trip the next day in
jeopardy. Thankfully, by the time Craig arrived early Saturday
morning from St. Paul, I woke up feeling better and able to go walk
with a pack.
</div>
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</div>
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Before we left, and while my
girlfriend, Looey, talked with Craig, I threw out the heavy shit in
my bag, repacking it into a lighter, more nimble,
“less-Tim-stuff-than-normal” amount of gear. On my scale, I
weighed my pack and belt kit at exactly thirty-two pounds. I had not
packed so lightly for a camping trip since Boy Scouts. Unfortunately,
following our three hour drive to where we planned to catch the
shuttle bus, I lifted Craig's pack. His backpack still weighed less
than mine! Disappointed, as always, I fell back on that old justified
rationalization: “I carry the shit we need, that you use, but won't
carry!” HA!</div>
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</div>
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Walking the trail from the shuttle
stop to one of the Kennedy Creek campsites we hoped to secure for the
night, we sweated in that horrid heat. I felt, and Craig looked,
completely drenched in perspiration. At the top of a hill, with no
trees growing on the hard rock surface to obstruct our view, we could
clearly see the big-big lake a short way to our east. The sunshine
hammered that rock so hard that it literally burned hot and stinging
when I sat down to rest. On those types of days without breeze, I now
learned, the steam rose from the lake's surface in a tall and solid,
shroud-like, wall of water vapor—hanging there like a curtain in a
sky-high theater stage. I then found another power of nature that I
never knew existed. I wondered at the immense forces of the gods of
the wind, when calm, if Apollo drew his chariot close above the
world.</div>
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</div>
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On that rock, as we drank fluids
greedily, an older woman, perhaps early in her fifties, and wearing
tan slacks and a white, short-sleeve blouse, walked up to our lookout
and chatted with us. She had ridden a shuttle, too, and just enjoyed
the walk along the Superior Hiking Trail on that icky stickly, hot
July day. Craig and I had sweat rushing down our faces, and we tried
to catch some shade under the small shrub trees that grew among the
lichen-covered rock. This woman, to our amazed and incredulous
disbelief, showed not a drop of salty sweat in her hair, on her face,
or on her clothing. After she moved along, and while we sat there a
spell more, Craig joked that she must have carried a solar shower and
changes of clothing in her small day pack on her back in order to
stay fresh and clean.</div>
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</div>
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We arrived at our camp around 1 PM,
following a short but draining 2.4 mile total hike in the heat. We
found the site nice but heavily used. After sitting around for a good
part of the afternoon, a nursing student from North Dakota State
University, a guy named Matt, walked into the camp and asked to share
the site. We agreed, but when some women walked in to ask the same
thing. Before Craig and I saw them, Matt had eagerly told them we had
no room and they left to the second, already occupied site up the
trail. (Idiot!).</div>
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</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
While Craig read one of his pulp
fiction books, I read the front sections of several newspapers,
before we would use them to build a campfire. Although hot as hell,
we needed a fire. Not bringing a stove to cut our weight, a nice fire
later in the evening would serve a double purpose for cooking and the
age old entertainment when camping: setting the scene for campfire
stories. Matt had no idea about what would come at him that night.
Yet, that afternoon, I learned a couple of lessons while hungry and
eating from a giant bag of plain M&M chocolate candies. First, it
took little effort to eat a pound of them unconsciously. Second, in
bitterly hot weather, M&M's can very well melt in your hands and
not just in your mouth! I had the candy coloring all over my hands
and I needed to wash my them with soap in the same stream where we
drew our water.</div>
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</div>
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When supper time arrived early that
evening, for me more out of boredom than the pangs of hunger, Craig
used the one piece of cook ware he did bring: A small quart-sized
aluminum camp pot for making our coffee and for boiling water over
the fire. We looked incredulously while Matt, the student, used his
ten piece camp cook kit of stainless steel, copper-bottomed dishes to
make a delicious looking pasta dish with white sauce. When Craig got
the stream water boiling, he and I used it to re-hydrated noodles,
veggies, and chicken parts in prepackaged styro-foam cups. Later, now
really hungry since I ate all the candies, I chewed on venison jerky
and dried fruit around the campfire as the night entered. Dark will
come quickly in the thick forest when the sun starts to settle over
the hills. We kept that fire small but nice, and I enjoyed it and
more snacks. To my intense jealousy, Matt roasted a juicy
cheddar-wurst sausage over the fire. It smelled and look fantastic.
Oddly, he did not use a stick from the forest. From his overstuffed
pack, he had removed and extended a heavy-looking, metal, telescopic
weenie roaster. I could only envy his culinary choices after our very
Spartan meal of noodles, fare fit for a helot.</div>
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</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Around the fire, Craig spent the rest
of the evening chatting with Matt, but the student did not have much
to say. Craig must have needed to release all of his pent up boredom
having only me to talk with him on so many previous trips. Poor Matt
got an earful for a few hours, most of it stories from Bill Bryson's
book, <u>A Walk in the Woods</u>, about Bryson's experiences on the
Appalachian Trail with a guy named Steven Katz. Craig loved that
book, and it provided him with a large part of the inspiration for
staring this Superior Hiking Trail. I liked the book, too, though I
heard the stories told, retold, and re-retold many times. In Craig's
and mine's experience and our shared antics on the trails, we usually
wondered which one of us represented Bryson, leaving the other poor
one the personification of curmudgeon Katz. We still argue about that
today, from time to time. I always defaulted to Craig fitting the
description of Katz, as a tall, burly guy with a scruffy beard while
camping</div>
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</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Tired, and surprisingly without back
trouble until that evening, I turned into the Eureka two-man tent
around 9:30 PM. I laughed to myself as I could just imagine poor Matt
driven to tears by his boredom about a book he never read, explained
to him by one of the consummate story tellers on the Superior Hiking
Trail. I do not think Craig lacked for camp fire story telling
skills. He always impressed me on that score. I do think Matt,
however, just did not have it in him to listen, or laugh, or
anything. I heard Craig's voice clearly but not a word from Matt as
they sat around the dwindling campfire. After a while, Craig took to
giving tips on carrying lighter weight packs and smarter, cheap gear.</div>
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</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Craig must have made it to the tent
before midnight. I had barely slept. In my eagerness to remove weight
from my pack, I brought only my self-inflating air mattress and two
awfully thin sleeping bag liners. I did not realize how cold the
forest at night would get once the sun's July hammer stopped heating
the anvil of the earth. The dark, cold woods almost froze me that
night. All night I slept miserably. At one point, in sleepless
delirium, I rolled my back into something. I put my hand behind me to
find out what I hit. To my shock and horrification, I realized I had
my hand on Craig's ass! Quickly, I scooted my entire body over more
to my own side by the tent door, as close as I could get and still
stay in the tent. Morning came early, and tired and cold, I rolled
out of bed to make a fire.</div>
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</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Craig and I packed up our gear that
morning and drew two liters of water each into our bottles from the
stream below our site. Craig then realized how freaking useless water
pump filters get. They weigh a lot, everything gets contaminated
anyway, and people do “things” in the same water from we drink.
From that day, on Craig's useful suggestion, we never carried the
pump again but instead would always treat the water with Puritabs. If
necessary to get out particles, we could skim the water through our
dirty socks. It would taste no different from the normal, filtered
stream water itself.</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In camp, getting ready to head to the
truck, we watched in feigned shock when Matt packed his over-sized
back pack. He even had extra things hanging on it. Craig supposed
later that Matt must have carried 50 to 60 pounds of gear. I could
easily see that point, considering the type of cook kit he carried.
It reminded me of how much gear I carried when starting these camping
and hiking trips three years prior. When ready, Matt went south and
Craig and I headed north.</div>
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</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
That Sunday afternoon, in the hotness
and the breezeless air, Craig and I walked up what we titled Mount
Motherfucker, a huge, hulking hill. To our relief, the trail eased up
on switchbacks and not straight up the side. At the top, we found a
look out view of the lake, now farther in the distance. Where in the
thick of that hard wood forest the trees parted ways, we found a spot
with a rest bench. After that tortuous climb, we almost brazenly
prayed for a breeze. We got that almost-prayer answered—almost.
While sitting, exhausted and drenched with sweat, the tree leaves
rustled just slightly. It lasted a shorter time that it takes to
write this sentence. We had a tantalized feel of cool, ever brief.
Who says prayers will not get answered?</div>
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</div>
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On the homeward stretch toward Craig's
little green truck, we passed two guys coming south from where they
camped at Sawmill Dome, a little round hill with a rock top. They had
passed our campsite the day before, heading north. They had had no
water since the previous night. Having almost drank all of ours, we
shared and split with them the remains of the half liter Craig and I
each had left in our supply. From their delirium and gratitude, we
labeled them with the Trail name, “The Touched Ones.”</div>
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</div>
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Of course, as it never fails, the trail
took the path of most resistance about a mile form the road where we
parked. It went up a high hill, skirting some low lying marsh that
blocked the exit from the trail. Walking the edge of a cliff above
the road, following the trail, I had to step over washed out parts
that gulley-knifed off the ledge. One trip or stumble and the world
would have hurt as gravity would have come up at me in a torrent.</div>
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</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The walk down the dirt road passed
uneventfully. As always when finishing a section on the way to the
car, I whistled the famous tune from <u>The Bridge On the River
Kwai</u>—that colonel's march or something, otherwise known as
“Comet—It makes you vomit. . .” We gratefully drank the extra
water we stowed in the truck and it went down like hot tea. The truck
cab itself felt like a furnace. On the way driving south toward Two
Harbors, MN, Craig and I stopped at a coffee shop along the highway.
We both ordered smoothies, which promptly melted before we got back
to the car. Instead of ice cold drinks, we drank lukewarm, raspberry
milk. The drink nonetheless refreshed us, with sugar at least, as the
steam continued to vapor upward and high from the huge lake behind
the little coffee shop building. The trip done, we drove back three
hours to drop me off at my home, a drive without many words but with
satisfaction of having done yet another low adventure on the Superior
Hiking Trail.</div>
<br />Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18937286.post-89129978924654302982019-07-10T01:12:00.002-05:002019-07-10T01:12:23.722-05:00Critique of Politics #7: The Personal Narrative and A New Participation in Civil Political Society<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Critique of Politics #7: The Personal
Narrative and A New Participation in Civil Political Society</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
By Tim Krenz</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
June 5, 2019</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
For Hometown Gazette</div>
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</div>
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Do you have power? Do you have REAL
political power? Absolutely, yes you do.</div>
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</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Social norms can mistake the act of
voting as the last obligation and last resort for an average
individual to express opinion and preferences in political affairs.
Outside of the professional or volunteer in the aptly named political
industry, we little understand the vast, latent, and unexplored
potential of the average citizen's impact beyond voting. Individual
votes, sought by a candidate and their supporting lobbies and
committees, do eventually add up to the entire turn out of voters,
and one side wins and everyone else loses.</div>
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</div>
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Voting itself gets lost in the
collective, where a sole and single person may think their vote means
either less by not following the conventional viewpoint; or that the
single vote means more by voting with everyone else. In the end, for
many who vote, voting ends as the passive-aggressive frustration of
casting a ballot to choose between the same evils—the evils we have
always had when people abdicate their participation except on
election day. We can no longer allow such passive practices by the
majority of the population, not just those who decline to vote.
Neither can we continue the elite domination of the system by the
fewer and the wealthier. Look where the two-party system has taken
the country, and the world. The result of the damage to government
and policy by only passively participating every year, two years,
four years or six, has increased. The house divides, more. It will
not stand. It must change, or we will suffer the consequences.</div>
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Instead of arbitrary choices of evil
and evil, we can change the norm. How do we make the change? We first
must change the minds of more people, the ones heretofore not
participating in solutions and the ones propping up the political
institutions which cause the problem in the first place. Then, we
must unleash the sleeping social power of everyone to effect the
political and social changes. We have no other course to saving the
government of the American people or the world at large. Again, to
repeat and repeat and repeat, things must change, or we WILL suffer
the consequences.</div>
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</div>
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How can we change minds, to recognize
our personal power over politics—beyond merely voting? It starts
with the most important act of regaining control of our own personal
narratives, in our lives, our civil society, and about our
political-economy. Too often, we as a society, our huge collective
mass, falls prey to the sound bytes, ideas, policies, advertising,
public relations, “spin,” and all the other propaganda which
accompanies the noise in our daily lives. For whether one thinks of
political advertising and media campaigns, or commercial and business
advertising, or anything designed to instill an idea or persuade
someone to vote or buy in a certain way, it amounts to nothing more
than organized and targeted manipulation—i.e. some type of
propaganda.</div>
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</div>
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Furthermore, modern society has fallen
prey to the phenomena of social media, a new primary source of news,
opinion-sharing, and personal interaction. We need to call it by a
proper name of “anti-social media,” and nothing more than a
collectivist attempt to manipulate the opinions and preferences of
disconnected people separated from physical contact to each other.
Social media as tools has good uses. When used to influence people's
choices, it has done damage to civil society. We can only deny its
impact on the politics of division and personal isolation to our
long-term peril.
</div>
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</div>
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Things brings us back to regaining
control of our personal narratives, and critically, control over our
stories, beliefs, values, morals, principles, and the ethics by which
we can live in good conscience. In the age of political systems
defined by an increasing conformity to the popular line, a personal
narrative can better filter the lies of leaders and followers. A
political system—possibly now or shortly in the future—based on
corruption, coercion, violent enforcement, and conflict to divide and
rule people can only survive by propagating the lies that create
collective conformity.</div>
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</div>
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What lies? We can find some glaring
ones, for example: that countries need to wage aggressive wars of
prevention; that children and other innocent people killed and
wounded in conflict only count as “collateral damage,” and not
human victims of a moral crime; that we have no responsibility to
help and/or feed the hungry poor of the world; that having
extravagant amounts of more money, more property, more toys leads us
toward happy spiritual fulfillment, and that we should emulate the
rich by stealing our own self-respect to become one of them; that
capitalism and socialism differ in that both do not eventually create
and operate a systemic state welfare for the elite and wealthy; that
the country have only two viable options in politics, the left and
the right, instead of the correct, ethical and moral side; that
individuals cannot make a difference where they live for a better
neighborhood or a better earth. These lies have germinated into the
national dialog and we have reached the point of their almost
permanent deception.</div>
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</div>
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As for the personal narrative, how does
one begin? Think of yourself. Have any readers ever written—actually
put pen to paper—a statement of personal ethics and principles by
which they can live a good, honest and conscientious life? I
challenge readers to start with that. State those things that you can
do that will help. State things by which you will always stand, in
the moral imperative of doing and protecting right and opposing
wrong. What will you endorse and support that meaningfully helps
change the world in your mind and your neighborhood for the better?
What wrongs must you ethically not support and even oppose with every
asset and fiber of your conscience and body? Then go on to further
refine these questions: “Who am I, really? Where am I in life? What
do I do? When do I need to do more and make hard choices? How can I
become a better neighbor, and in turn create a better world? Why must
I help create a peaceful, positive change?”</div>
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</div>
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Start the personal narrative with
those. Stick to them as best as you can. Obey those laws that you
must, especially the Natural Law that you must withdraw consent from
the fraud and the lies the world and its leaders want to impose. Take
seriously your responsibility to your family and your employment.
Change begins at home. But if enough readers do this personal
narrative only once, it can translate into some rather important
accomplishments. However, unless we understand our own personal
narratives, we would only remain part of the deceptions.</div>
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</div>
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Use this personal narrative as your
starting point and guide-post in all your personal actions and
efforts with others. The action can extend to unlimited ways and
means of creating some fairly powerful effects. For, in all
seriousness, we live on earth for two reasons: To love our fellow
humans and to help them if we can. (If we cannot do those, we should
not make things worse). If we apply this narrative and guidelines,
and our supreme purpose in life to politics, the world has some
chance of surviving the lies and conflicts resulting from them. We
would do so only to our great benefit. The change begins with us.</div>
<br />Scipio Cepicanushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17631830262399035550noreply@blogger.com0