Past Ruminations...

July 1-31, 2002
  

Buck Rogers here we go. It seems the aerospace world may be on the verge of a paradigm shift. If the science behind Russian scientist Evgeny Podkletnov's gravity experiments pans out, and NASA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and BAE Systems are all attempting to verify and duplicate his experiments, we might truly see a sci-fi, Buck Rogers future. Jane's, the military, aerospace research organization has been making much ado about the possibilities, which if true, will change everything from energy and propulsion to the much darker possibilities of weapons, though anti-missile weapons might not be so dark.

Boeing has created a project called "GRASP'. As Nick Cook, a Jane's aerospace consultant, explains in his article on the phenomena.

GRASP’ — Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion.

GRASP’s objective is to explore propellentless propulsion (the aerospace world’s more formal term for anti-gravity), determine the validity of Podkletnov’s work and "examine possible uses for such a technology". Applications, the company says, could include space launch systems, artificial gravity on spacecraft, aircraft propulsion and ‘fuelless’ electricity generation — so-called ‘free energy’.

The darker side of the research is in the direction of weapons,  especially anti-missile weapons, though they could be used on any moving object, including airplanes, not just military airplanes or missles.

But it is also apparent that Podkletnov’s work could be engineered into a radical new weapon. The GRASP paper focuses on Podkletnov’s claims that his high-power experiments, using a device called an ‘impulse gravity generator’, are capable of producing a beam of ‘gravity-like’ energy that can exert an instantaneous force of 1,000g on any object — enough, in principle, to vaporise it, especially if the object is moving at high speed.

Podkletnov is strongly against the militarization of his work, but it seems to me there is at lest one "white knight' use of his technology when applied to an anti-missile context. A future defense shield to protect against the now-known-to-be-real possibilities of asteroid impacts and other bodies of space matter such as comets. It would mean a real defense against the threat of global annihilation.

I am not sure what I hope in relation to this technological possibility. It could be another unsupportable hoax, like the cold fusion fiasco of the 80's, which would definitely please OPEC, especially the Arab portions of it. The science could also be real and if it is, it will change the world as we know it, especially as related to energy. Depending on how long it would take to develop the power generating implications of the science and technology, there is no denying it commercialization would forever relegate fossil fuels to minor significance and finally usher in the truly electrical age.

Help from an outside source. My daughter showed up at lunch time to help me out this afternoon. Sometimes we just get overwhelmed by the chaos and some people have a gift of creating order out of the mess. They are very special people and we, who fall outside that category, need their help from time-to-time to get out from under the disorganization of our modern life. We all need to have those kind of people in our lives.

I am reminded of Paul's illustration of the Body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12. He talks about an organism composed of many mutually gifted and interacting parts. Expressing the mutual dependency of the situation in verse 25b he says, "the members may have the same care for one another." We all have our specialties, some that are common and some that are rare, and some that only come into play in special circumstances. Modern life, with its overwhelming complexity, constant demands assaulting the senses, and unparalleled clutter of "stuff" threatens sometimes to drown us. That is when someone with the gift of ordering the chaos can be a lifesaver.

As equally important as having their help, however, is our respecting their effort. We need to do our best to maintain the order they have established for us. Realistically speaking, we will slowly settle back into disorder, but if we hold their efforts in proper respect we will push that need for future help far into the future, to months, not days or weeks away.

Help, is just that, help. It is not them doing it for us. These gifts from God are not our servants, they are our helpers in time of need. As such, we have to extend ourselves to maintain what they have created. I would classify this effort as a moral imperative. Additionally, this cooperative mindset of receiving and respecting their help is far removed from the "I have a maid" mentality so many of us have. For one thing, a maid does not usually have the gift of bringing order out of chaos. They usually just straighten up and remove the surface grime from whatever is there. They normally put things back in well established places and help us maintain the underlying order, but they don't create it.

One of the problems of success and even moderate wealth, especially for business people who are used to having "employees", is the tendency to view all situations, including these special category conditions, as transactions, rather than relationships. As such, we fail to view them in their proper context and for Christians this can be a fatal flaw. Even if we pay for the services, they are categorically different than simple capital for labor transactions. The source of the effort, while it may be monetarily compensated (a laborer is worthy of their hire), is really a sharing of gifts. The root is not the capitalism of the exchange, it is the underlying relationship and the give and take of community.

In the current debate over the evils of capitalism there are those who would throw out the baby with the bath water, to use an old, but true aphorism. Capitalism grew up in Western, Christian culture, but in its modern expression seems far removed from the Christian principals underlying its genesis. I don't know enough about the history and philosophy of capitalism to comment on how we got to where we are. However, I can see the current state of the system and say that left to the influence of the postmodern, post Christian, rule of law society we all share, it is doomed to be either strangled by regulation or overthrown by revolution.

Why? Because law cannot address what is fundamentally an issue of the heart. Capitalism without a heart is simply a machine and machines make no human distinctions, have no caring paths of action. While the law may undergird actions of the heart, the heart acts without the need of the intervention of the law. It does what is right from its inner sense of character and God given rightness, what we used to call conscience.

Capitalism has lost its conscience and without it, it is simply a machine, a machine run amok. This is why we see situations like the current labor and management problems in baseball or the situation where Pinkerton Computer Consultants was sold to venture capitalists. The officers cashed out their stock ahead of the sale and made millions while the employees, who had the stock in their ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan), got stuck for 50 cents on the dollar. Those officers and the venture capitalists who bought the company lacked a proper conscience. While the deal was apparently legal, it was immoral. Was the fault the underlying capitalism. Not really. Capitalism is a form of power and all power can be exercised immorally. The fault was the lack of conscience and the failure of centuries of Western Christian input to create or at least sustain capitalism with a heart. Without this leavening capitalism has all the earmarks of prostitution, and a degraded form of prostitution at that.

So, we come back to the help I received today. I compensated my daughter for her efforts. However, I will also respect those efforts. While there was a tinge of capitalism to our exchange, it was not its root. The root was our relationship and mutual respect, without which there would have been no real purpose to the exchange.

I wonder where all the secularists expect to get their heart and conscience? I wonder what is the future of capitalism, even of democracy, without it?

Character. The only player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame this year was Ozzie Smith, the acrobatic shortstop of the St. Louis Cardinals. Commentators are calling his acceptance speech wonderful, brilliant, one of the greatest ever at Cooperstown. That may true, but there is one aspect of his speech that struck a resounding cord with me. Just before reading a poem commemorating Jack Buck, the St. Louis sportscaster who died this year, he said

I sincerely believe that there is nothing truly great in any man or woman, except their character, their willingness to move beyond the realm of self and into a greater realm of selflessness.

He rounded that out by saying

Giving back is the ultimate talent in life. That is the greatest trophy on my mantle.

From a human perspective, Ozzie identified the essence of who we are as we make our way through this world we live. We are our character. Without that, we are nothing, a mere collection of toys, as the disgusting bumper sticker, "He who dies with the most toys wins" so aptly illustrates. I think that sentiment also defines the current problems on both Wall street and in baseball, as well as in our culture in general. Greed at all costs defines the collection of toys, of accumulating more and more. Character defines hard decisions, decisions made for the greater good, made in the greater realm of unselfishness. Character accepts limits.

Both Wall street and baseball and we as a culture and civilization are in dire need of men and women of character. We need people who are willing to accept the limits that character demands. We need people who see beyond the accumulation of "toys" to the establishment of substance. We need men and women to aspire to be people of character, willing to make the right decisions, to accept the hard choices, realizing that sometimes it is not about me, it is about them.

Restarting the engines. A new week. Today was filled with demos, technical glitches, and mountains of demands. I have not been using the alarm, instead letting the morning's natural flow get me up and going. I woke up very early this morning, but forgetting the demands of the day, I just went back to sleep for several hours. That put me a bit behind, and much of the day was spent playing catch-up.

It appears the world survived my workless weekend, though things did happen elsewhere. Many people had to labor unceasingly to save nine Pennsylvania coal miners trapped when their drilling punctured an old shaft filled with water that then flooded their workspace. Sunday was also the day baseball inducted its new members into the Baseball Hall of Fame, while my home team, the Baltimore Orioles, got into a major brouhaha with the Boston Red Socks which resulted in a bench clearing brawl. Life and death and entertainment, the weekend had it all.

Now it is back to the ongoing cycle of email, projects, and keeping the office running, necessitating decisions, decisions, and more decisions. Isn't that the real substance of life, decisions and what we make of them?

Skipped work. We had dinner, but other than the preparation and cleanup, I avoided work today. It is strange to say on a Sunday that you "avoided" work. I guess I have completely lost the sense of a day of rest, since if you are resting you aren't avoiding work, you are resting. The premise of avoiding is that it is something you are supposed to be doing. This seems to point up an underlying premise that is at best skewed from how I think life was meant to function, what it was meant to be.

This being Sunday, some of the things I am thinking about, reside in the images of Genesis. I see Adam first engaged in relationship, initially with God and the animals, and later with Eve. Man had a job to do, to cultivate and keep the garden, but that does not appear as the purpose of man, but rather the garden was there for man, not man for the garden. Maybe that gets close to what I have lost. Work is for me. It is something for me to do. It is not who I am. I am not here for work, work is here for me. I am going to have to get a handle on this because I think it brings me closer to the root of my dismay.

Weekends. I normally work at least a few hours on the weekend. One of the disadvantages of working out of a home office is that even to check my email I have to get into my working environment and then all of the things that need to be done for this or that project call out to me like the Sirens of Greek Mythology.

That image is interesting considering my previous posting. The Sirens were a group of sea nymphs who lured mariners to their destruction on the rocks and reefs surrounding their island. Sometimes it is like the call of work is a call to rocks and reefs of destruction, a less obvious destruction but destruction all the same. If we cannot separate ourselves from work, are we not seduced and eventually bound for destruction.

This weekend I am pretty much avoiding most work, though I do have someone coming for dinner and tentatively a bit of work on Sunday afternoon. I am not just avoiding my regular work, but I am avoiding house work, which also calls out to me, reminding of a long list of things to do. I resist. I am refusing to pull the cord to try and start the engine today. I have to find the source of this discontent.

Summer doldrums. One of the tech columns I read commented that summer doldrums are the bane of columnists everywhere. While he was referring the usual dearth of technical news in the summer, I felt a kinship with the sentiment. His article was entitled "No Fireworks on the Fourth" and it is interesting how things like that can start you thinking on tangents unrelated to their author-intended subject matter.

The larger community, in which I live, Catonsville, Maryland, has always had an impressive Fourth of July fireworks display and this year was no exception. From a purely technological and aesthetic viewpoint the display surpassed anything previously presented and the thousands of people gathered on the grounds of the local high school sallied forth with the appropriate oohs and aahs and closing cheers. Despite all of this, there was underneath it all, at least for me, a flatness which turned out to be the beginning of my summer doldrums.

It is often hard to discern if what is happening to you is uniquely your issue, or if you share any of your emotional climate with the rest of your friends, neighbors, and larger communities. I haven't noticed anyone else writing or commenting on a general sense of malaise infecting the populace this summer, so it must be me. If it is not, and you have experienced the same thing, please let me know, but for now I will assume it primarily a personal sense of sluggishness.

Sometimes, I guess you can lift yourself up by your bootstraps and break yourself out of this trap of discontent, but most often it requires the help of an outside source. That source hasn't yet appeared for me, so I vacillate back and forth trying to jumpstart my initiative. I am like someone continually pulling on the starting cord of a lawnmower that sputters for short while and then stops again. Underneath there is a nagging suspicion that something more fundamental is amiss, but you tell yourself you are just tired, a little burnt out, or need a vacation.

While all those things may be true, are they the root cause or just symptoms of a deeper issue seeking to be identified? I think there is a deeper issue. Hopefully we can bring that issue, or issues, to the light of day.

Hope. One of my favorite songs from the Christian music perspective is Blue Skies from Point of Grace. It talks about how doubt and fear leech the strength out of our lives. They use dark nights, gray skies, and other images of depression to get their point across, but then their refrain offers the hope that blue skies are still there, sometimes just hidden for the moment, in Jesus Christ.

As I listened to the song this morning I thought of the essential nature of hope, of the possibility of a meaningful future, and how it sustains one during times of difficulty. The power of hope is the power of fundamental sustenance. But where does hope come from? My irreligious friends, some who claim to be atheists, some agnostics, get it from the possibility of either sustained good times (if times are good for them now) or of better times ahead (if that is at all possible).

That led me to think about how people who seem to have it all, money, fame, and fortune, commit suicide. It came to me that they had lost hope. Why? Because the current "good" was not good enough and since they had tried all of what their material existence had to offer, nothing was left to give them hope of something better. For whatever reason they couldn't take the next step into the spiritual and seek a deeper reason for hope.

Now to be honest, I have had people call this spiritual foundation of hope "pie in the sky" delusional thinking. All you are doing, they tell me, is pushing hope far enough away, into (for them at least) the unverifiable realm of spiritual things. That way, I am told, I can get my cake and while being able to eat it too. I agree that on some levels this is a valid critique. However, our real problem is that we are talking to each other from different universes. In their universe no hope beyond a better physical tomorrow is possible, but since age and decay steal from them at every turn, loss of hope is inevitable. In mine, a better hope is guaranteed by God in Jesus Christ. All you have to do is join the family to get the hope into your life and it doesn't matter that age and decay seem to steal everything, eternity awaits.

They then throw back, "What if your hope is a lie?" and suddenly we are back to Pascal's wager (see Sisyphus and religious faith 7-17-02). This appears to be a never ending circular argument. That is why I have given up trying to convert my irreligious friends. I can't force them from their universe into mine. However, my hope has sustained me through some pretty dark times, so even from a pragmatic, can my life be successful here and now viewpoint, my view trumps theirs.

Does that make it true? No. Its truth or falsehood is within itself. I don't need to defend the Gospel to those who will accept no argument I make as valid, I just need to live a hopeful, successful Christian life. If that isn't enough, then nothing is.

Grace and peace to your day.

The pot calling the kettle black. One thing that is normally not tolerated in our society is someone accusing another of something they themselves are guilty of. It is considered the height of hypocrisy. Almost as bad is condemning an enemy of some form of the things you tolerate or don't complain about among your friends or associates. Again, severely hypocritical. Unless it seems, it is politically correct accusations.

There appears to be a lot of these type of hypocritical accusations flying around these days. Whether it is the democrats coming down on President Bush for his Harken stock sales or Vice President Cheney for his Halliburton divestiture or racial demagoguery in California. Anne Coulter deals with the political attacks in her recent column, exposing the obvious two-facedness. But this tactic appears to be the order of the day and not just with the president. Larry Elder has pointed out the inherent dishonesty of the racial hysteria crowd in his discussion of the recent police event in Inglewood, CA where a white policeman is seen using strong physical force to subdue what appears to be a compliant Black suspect.

In thinking about the Inglewood incident and its extreme amplification by the media into a racial holocaust, it seems to me that more and more noise is being made over the less and less significant. One police officer in the presence of four, including a Black officer, using a little extra force on any suspect, much less a Black suspect, falls within the statistical chatter of human activity. However, it is almost as if the demagogues of racial politics are running out of fodder to feed their subsistence machine, so they reach to the mundane and elevate it to significance. One would have thought that the Black Mayor, Black Police Chief, and majority Black City Council of Inglewood, which has a majority Black population, could handle this issue internally without the demagogic excesses of outside agitators. Do these people really think their protestations of racism don't have a racist tinge of their own? Do these "Chicken Littles" really believe that the Black elected officials of Inglewood are incapable of dealing with the issue because they are "victims" and need their intervention. Give me a break. What Inglewood does say to me is this particular emperor has no clothes any more and people are beginning to see it.

Hyperbole and the truth. Steve Miller's article today in the Washing Times on Jesse Jackson points up the continuing problem that Mr. Jackson has with the truth. Most of Mr. Jackson's public pronouncements are at best hyperbole (giving him the benefit of doubt), but most of his constituency takes them as truth, and he does nothing to correct the inconsistency, but instead uses that acceptance to launch even more hyperbole. Let me give you an example his "hyperbole".

 "Isn't terrorism the four police officers who beat Rodney King? Or the police that shot Amadou Diallo? What we must do is fight for a definition of terrorism and hold all those who fall under that definition accountable."

The simple answer is no, those acts are not terrorism. Now the second half of the statement is the key to the issue, since he who controls the definitions controls the discourse. I learned that from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. One of the reasons his novels were so long is that he spent an inordinate amount of bookspace recapturing language from the meanings hijacked by the Russian Communists. What Jesse Jackson is attempting to do is hijack the meaning of terrorist to his own political ends.

For someone who makes their living with the English language, that grates to bone. However, I understand that this is done all the time in politics and in the discourses of power. I don't like it, but I understand it happens. What is dangerous is that when you begin playing this game of king of the shifting sands of meaning hill is the effect of the law of unintended consequences. For example, as the definition of free speech was expanded in later portion of the 20th century, the system found itself defending pornography, even in its most base forms. Nothing had changed but the definition. Old freedoms guarded new borders, not necessarily of their liking. Those who controlled the definitions may not have foreseen the unintended consequences. (I know there are those who say this was all part of a plot, as is Jesse Jackson's efforts, but the law of unintended consequences still holds.)

Jesse Jackson needs to be careful, since where do you stop your slide down the slippery slope if you define such unplanned acts as the Rodney King situation as terrorism? The police officers did not go on duty thinking who can they terrorize today, but gang bangers or drug dealers who engage in drive by shootings do plan on killing and terrorizing their victims. Do we really want to label them as terrorists and bring the mechanics of terrorist enforcement into these essentially local and internal issues?

Jesse, you need to think about the consequences of some of your hyperbole which others take as truth before it reaches out and bites you where you least expect.

Pruning the vine. You cannot be successful in allocating your limited time effectively if you are not willing to prune the vine of demands made on your life. There is only so much you can do and some things are more important than others. Only some things advance the essential purpose of your life.

A well traveled Biblical image is that of the vine keeper pruning his vines, removing deadwood (non-productive branches) so that the available nourishment will be focused on the remaining producing branches. That is the way to better wine and to take the image into the arena of human aspirations, to a better life. However, the Biblical image of pruning, as applied to the lives of believers, admits the inherent painfulness of the process. It hurts to let go of things we have invested in, even if they are draining our resources with no foreseeable hope of an adequate return.

With grape vines the choice is pretty simple. The purpose of a grape vine is to produce grapes. Anything on the vine that diminishes that purpose is essentially deadwood and needs to be pruned. Lives are not so straightforward, since defining a workable purpose for an individual life can be a complicated task. It is not for naught that a favorite question put to many older adults is "What do you want to be when you grow up?" despite the fact that they are long past the age where the question would normally apply.

One of the great philosophical and religious questions of the modern age is what should I do with my life? What will give me meaning? What will satisfy me? Those questions presuppose the right and ability of choice. They are thoroughly modern questions, brought about by the fluidness of modern social structures and the exceptional opportunities provided by capitalistic economics. There is a refrain, only in America, used to describe the ability of anyone to become anything, from bottle washer to President, to go from rags to riches by the sheer force of their own sustained effort. The choice is considered yours to make and if you have the essential health and mental acuity, limits are mostly viewed as self-imposed. We think that the question is meant to be answered by the internal desires of the individual.

The interesting thing about Christians is that instead of those questions being internally directed, the Bible argues that it is God who directs the course of a man's life. One idea, gleaned from the thrust of the whole of scripture but best said in Proverbs 16:9 "In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps." was made popular by Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471) in The Imitation of Christ, Book One, Chapter 19 in which he says, "Man proposes, while God disposes."

So, reflecting on the necessity of pruning, it would seem that a Christian should consider the steps the Lord has determined for him when applying the shear to the branches. However, is it any easier for Christians to determine their God given direction in life than it is for secularists to determine their inner directed course? Judging by my life and that of most of my Christian friends I don't think so. Christian angst is every bit as complicated and real as secularist angst. There is one significant difference. The Christian at least believes in the possibility of an external answer, a God-given direction. The secularist must come up with his own solution and even if he gets advice from those around him, it is only advice, and subject to the whims and vagaries of all human expression.

This exercise is important to me since I have begun pruning the vine of my life and it is proving to be exceptionally difficult. I don't think I am unique. One thing keeps me hopeful. As a Christian I look to the promises of Scripture that tell me that God will "direct my steps." So, if I can only learn to get out of the way, the wind of the Spirit will fill my sails sending me toward the correct course, and then anything that inhibits that direction will need to be pruned.

Sorry, did you say I was blocking the wind?

Time and value judgment. Whether we realize it or not, we make a value judgment on the various aspects and activities of our life by the time we dedicate to them. There is an old aphorism that says, "Put you money where your mouth is" which basically argues that if you are willing to put resources into something it demonstrates its importance to you.

The most significant resource we possess is time and where we spend that resource demonstrates the importance we place on the item, whether it be a person, activity, object, or some other item. I heard the portion of a sermon on the way home from church Sunday that talked about family and job. The central thesis was that we are more willing to spend our time on our job, which often holds no allegiance to us, while being willing to shortchange our families which hold us in the highest allegiance.

The preacher was primarily talking to men, fathers and husbands, who sacrifice their family on the altar of work. While his point was valid, even important and necessary, he failed to consider the ramifications of the male psyche. Men tend to find their sense of self-worth in what they accomplish and the chief means of accomplishment is their work. They see themselves as what they do and what they have done.

This brings up an important question. Do men sacrifice their families because they have internalized an incorrect value system of self-worth or does that self-worth defined as accomplishment just need a new path, one that includes God and family, as well as work? The preacher did not address this issue. However, it has been something I have been thinking about for some time.

I currently have come down on the side of a new path for self-worth, but defining that path is another issue. Since all of the history of families lies in the arena of fallen man (Judeo-Christian idea of inherited sin from Adam that plagues us from conception), what can we use as a model for this new path, since all of our examples are essentially corrupted. That is my current stumbling block, but one I hope to overcome with future study.

I am interested in any resource any of you might know about dealing with these issues.

Paradigm drift. One of the technical news resources I receive recently discussed the idea of paradigm drift, a play on the concept of paradigm shift that was a 90's buzz word. The article was in the context of the current market and economy and since CIO's are taking less chances on new technology, the question that was asked was "Is innovation dead?" I took the question as hyperbole since the whole concept is patently absurd. As long as we continue as a human society innovation will be a major component of everything we do.

The idea of drifting rather than shifting is interesting though. It conjures up images of malaise and stagnation, of an aimlessness of purpose as if you have lost your way. To say a paradigm has lost its way (I know I am personifying a gestalt) is really to say it has lost its leadership. Now leadership can be visible, singular, and proactive as when a company like Microsoft advances new standards or pushes software in a new direction or it can be collective and behind the scenes, as when the web and hypertext information delivery took on a life of its own in the late 90's.

Sometimes overt, singular paradigm leadership clashes with collective, behind the scenes leadership. Who wins? Well I think it depends on the inherent utility and underlying dynamics of the issues involved, but I think most often it is collective leadership. Take the Web. When companies tried to claim portions for their own agenda, such as the online procurement and buying auction efforts, they failed miserably and many billions of dollars were thrown away chasing those attempts at singular paradigm leadership. However, a collective approach, using point to point connections (P-to-P) and ad hoc sharing is going strong and garnering a significant portion of the procurement efforts. Admittedly, this is not the procurement process envisioned by business and industry, but it is procurement non-the-less and the most successful example to date.

I watched a movie recently that for me explains the issues involved here. It was "The Affair of the Necklace" that chronicled the trigger that brought down the French monarchy and ushered in the French Revolution. An essential part of the plotting of the particulars in the story was identifying someone's need and then figuring out how to meet it in a way that advances your own agenda. That is pretty much marketing 101. However, there is a significant difference between what I perceive as a need and what you actually consider a fundamental need and that disconnect is source of most marketing and business failures. Much of what is classified as "knowing your customers" is really finding out what their real needs are.

Going back to our Web example and online procurement we see that business and entrepreneurs tried to market a solution to a perceived need, not a real need or least a need that had not yet become real to those who were the target audience. Why is P-to-P succeeding against the across the board failure of commercial procurement networks? Because it is meeting a real need. Teenager, college students, and young adults have an intense need for music. It drives so much of their collective experience that it is almost like air and food to them. However, since the inception of the LP and later the CD, groups have released collections of songs that very often only had one or two actual tracks that anyone wanted. You were required to purchase the whole CD to get the couple of tracks you wanted to here.

Enter computerized music and MP3. Now you could organize your music in a way never before possible. You could listen only to those songs you wanted to hear. You could even set up ad hoc listening experiences and save those for later use or pass them onto friends as an expression of your own creative effort. Suddenly everyone was sharing the songs they liked the most. How did the business world respond (read music industry)? They tried to stop, shut down, and in some way limit this sharing. They continued to release music only as a generalized collection of songs on a whole CD forcing upon the buying public the same issues as before, buying a whole CD to get one or two or three tracks that really interested you.

What should they have done? Marketed music as single tracks and sold them as MP3s themselves. Selling a single downloaded MP3 for somewhere between .25-.50 each would break the initial barrier of being forced to buy something you don't want. Would it do away with the successful P-to-P procurement network? No, but I think it would reduce it considerably and allow people who basically want to support the artists they like by buying the songs they like (not the prepackaged collections with 80-90% unwanted material) a road to successful and morally proper consumerism.

Sometimes business and industry can grasp the collective paradigm and launch a successful campaign to provide leadership within that area. The music industry has an opportunity to do this at this moment and they should grasp the moment, the nexus point if you will, and go where their public has already gone. Otherwise, they will indeed be caught in paradigm drift and see their whole industry slowly implode.

Sisyphus and religious faith. As I labor so hard to work myself out of the current economic hole that my decisions and the economy has gotten me into, I reflect on the motivation for my hard work and I come smack up against Sisyphus and the Apostle Paul. How so you ask?

The root of the Sisyphus myth is that as a punishment for various offenses and disdaining of the gods he was given an unspeakable penalty in which the whole of his being was exerted toward accomplishing nothing; he was condemned rolled a massive rock up a hill in the underworld only to have it roll back down forcing him to start over. His toil and existence had no meaning. All those who live in a materialistic, unbelieving world, are like Sisyphus, since nothing they do has any real meaning.

Ok you say, but how does Paul fit into this? Well, he reflected the essence of Sisyphus in 1 Corinthians 15:14 when he said "And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith." As an old, now passed, radio preacher, Dr. J. Vernon Magee used to say, "That's where the rubber meets the road." If Jesus is not who he said he was, then all our toil and existence has no meaning; we are not really Christians, we are Sisypheans.

So why do I toil so earnestly? Because I have faith. I do not believe my toil and existence have no meaning. I believe it all has a purpose in God's plan and Jesus has been truly raised. You may counter with "What if you are wrong and your belief is all an illusion?" Then I am left with a wager, one made famous by an earlier philosopher, Blasé Pascal. There is no way short of dying that I can know if my belief is an illusion or not, so I must wager on the future. All my experiences of faith, my various visions and other "spiritual" events, those could all be delusions or wishful thinking. What then? I still must choose what course to run, that of faith or not faith. That choice is the essence of the wager: faith or not faith.

As a result, the fundamental question is which course (faith or not faith), if proven true gives the best result? Well without a doubt, faith. With faith life has meaning and every choice has responsibility and vindication. Well you say what if faith is false and you lose your wager? Well then, my life has had meaning and purpose, however transient, that it would never have had if I rejected faith. If I had wagered on not faith, I would have chosen from the outset a course that has no meaning, a course where my toil and existence is of no ultimate purpose, essentially a Sisyphean path.  

So, when I get tired of the grind, I remember Sisyphus and Paul and of course Jesus, and I make my wager and continue at the appointed task. I make this wager on a continuing basis every day, sometimes every hour. So do you, whether you realize it or not.

Writing and energy. Today was a long day of work, as was yesterday, and will be tomorrow. That leaves little time for blogging. It also leaves little energy. One thing I have learned as I have been writing these thoughts and opinions over the last few months is that writing takes caring, and caring takes energy. Work drains energy. Hence writing is harder to come by.

Now you may ask, don't you make your living writing? Sometimes. Sometimes I index. Sometimes I do reformatting and document preparation, designing templates, and applying the changes to existing materials. Creative writing is different than technical writing. It requires more thought, more passion, and that needs more energy.

Often when writing something for this blog late at night, I start out half asleep, but by the time I am finished I am wide awake, trying to come down from an adrenalin rush. It will hit me 15 or 20 minutes later, but while the game is afoot, energy is being consumed. So, if you have any BTUs to spare, send them my way.

Business, democracy, capitalism, and religious faith. One of the fundamental roots of democracy is business, and one of the fundamental roots of business is capitalism. Without the flow of capital and investment, business cannot grow and without expansion, there are no new jobs and existing jobs are in peril. Without jobs and a means to provide for one's family, stable neighborhoods and reasonable social discourse are not possible. Without stable neighborhoods and reasonable social discourse then democracy, which is essentially an interactive, social form of government, cannot exist.

One sure way to hurt any democracy is to fundamentally hurt its businesses. In the last year we had seen a steady barrage of attacks against the fundamentals of American business and capitalism, not by al qa'ida, the extreme left, or any other anti-American group, but by the executives of the very businesses themselves. This is a self-inflicted wound, a form of suicide, if you will.

Where did this sudden destructive course of action come from? In my opinion, it came from the current lack of religious faith which has formed the basis of the moral underpinnings of our society since its inception. While men will always falter morally, when the general thrust of society is moral, it tempers the worst abuses, and makes those who participate in them social outcasts. One of the primary purposes of money is to create social standing and when the society is generally moral, those who are immoral become pariahs in the public sphere, despite their riches.

While we like to think, and pundits like to pontificate, that we operate our society and government under the rule of law, this law cannot rule effectively without the moral and ethical demands that back up and give substance to the letter of the law. Otherwise, the law becomes just another obstacle to be maneuvered around and everyone becomes in essence criminals not yet caught.

Law, in an of itself, holds no society or economic structure together. The law only effectively serves its purpose in a society already guided by conscience and the moral demands that decency and order makes on the lives of its citizens. Without those underpinnings, law can only be effective as the Big Brother looking over our shoulders and participating in every public decision, searching for noncompliance. Law would have to be absolutely intrusive, since how else could compliance be guaranteed in a society that has abandoned its religious underpinnings, and in the process, the basis for its moral and ethical decision making.

There are those who like to believe that God is not necessary and better off dead. They feel that religion is passé at best and a hindrance to social advancement. The only problem is that the society emerging from this post-modern, post-Christian Western social system is an amoral society with no reliable charts to navigate with and no cohesive foundation to gather the necessary consensus of action and decision making.

If God is dead, then the rule of law has become the new god, the anti-Christ if you will, and the only way it can administer its domain is with the exercise of power, pervasive power. Remove God from man's conscience and you have to replace Him with something. Situational ethics and politically correct rule of law is a poor substitute and for me sounds the death knell to inalienable rights. After all, if there is no creator to bestow my unalterable rights upon me, and instead I must depend on the good graces and common will of my fellow citizens, then I see dire times ahead.

We must remember that Lenin's high ideals led to Stalin's Big Brotherism, and the same thing has been repeated throughout history whenever God is no longer in the Dock, no longer is the arbiter between the follies of man. We make very poor gods.

It appears the pigeons are coming home to roost and the nest is getting most foul.
 

Home again, home again, jiggity, jig. Nick survived the trip home without incident and has settled back into his native environment. It will be interesting to hear his musings over the next few weeks. It didn't take long to settle back in. His older sister and her husband took him to the beach today, something missing from his stay in Maryland. Sun and surf are hard to compete with and for a boy born and bred in Florida they are a normal part of life.

Things are quiet here. The house is silent and the cats and Clifford only have me to engage them. It will take a while to get everything put away and reorganized, but on the whole it was good and rewarding experience. I think Sarah decided that she didn't miss a brother after all. As for me, while it was a learning experience to be with a young boy for four weeks, I am sure that God knew what He was doing when He gave me a girl, and only one at that.

Saying goodbye. Nick, my nephew, leaves today. We are in the process of getting him ready to go. While doing his laundry and packing up his suitcase and knapsack won't take very long, his imprint will echo around my house for several weeks to come. I expect to find little remembrances of his visit tucked in the various cubbyholes of my life from time to time.

He is a bit homesick, but as he gets ready to leave he is already missing some of the things here such as Clifford, my Akita. Nick doesn't have a dog and they developed a rough and ready relationship. Clifford is big enough to wrestle with and strong enough for a decent walk, both of which he and Nick engaged in regularly.

I expect that when he gets home he will miss the hills, the stream in the back yard, and the great trees and lush greenery that are everywhere. The sandy Florida greenery is different than the bushes, honeysuckle, soft grass, and maples and oaks that are everywhere around my home. I know he will miss the Patapsco River. He liked to go fishing there. While he has lakes and ponds at home, he doesn't have an accessible river. The Patapsco is only 40-80 feet across in this area, and in the place where he would go to, less than four feet deep. It has enough fish to keep a young fisherman interested, but it is not big enough to really intimidate you and is accessible to a young boy.

However, I am sure he will be glad to get home, to the familiar beat of family, friends, and neighborhood. No matter how much fun it is to visit a new place is, there is still no place like home.

So much to do, so little time. I am back. The last twelve days have been quite a whirlwind for me, trying to balance the demands of work and more work, a long awaited visit by my wife from her out-of-town job, a holiday, and, a twelve year old, hyperactive, infinitely inquisitive, boy who has a 10 to 15 minute self-directed attention span. About the only thing that kept him from pinging me was when he went fishing, which usually consumed about one to two hours; today he was there and back in 35 minutes.

It has been a learning experience, since in many ways I was probably very much like Nick as a kid. I was also hyperactive, demanding of interaction, and couldn't keep my mouth shut for more than 5 minutes. Nick and my chief differences lie in my interests in sports and reading, which helped keep me busy and self-directed for longer stretches of time.

There is a standing joke among parents that they hope you get a child just like yourself, so you can understand what your parents went through with you. I didn't. We only had one child, and she was a girl, and a relatively easy to raise girl at that, despite her physical and medical problems. So, having Nick visit for month has allowed me to appreciate the nuances of boys and what my parents had to go through.

Here are a few observations. Girls respect your privacy more, maybe because they desire it so much for themselves. Boys, and I am assuming Nick is something of a prototypical boy, tend to forget you have any privacy and just barge in and make immediate demands. As a result, I have had very little privacy, and only relatively short periods of time where I was uninterrupted. That has taken a lot of energy getting used to and it is that aspect of Nick I will not miss. However, I will miss his boundless energy, his unquenchable inquisitiveness, and his affable, if adolescent, humor.

I work in the cribbery/toddler service at my church, dealing with children up to four years old. One of the reasons I do it, besides the fact that there is a need, is that it helps me both stretch myself and keep myself grounded. As we age we tend to pull in, to contract around ourselves, so I feel I need stretching, and we tend to lose contact with the simple things in life, which young children represent.