Dreams

Dans ma tout à fait nuit, Je rêve des cordes, et les noeuds ont attaché très fortement.

Je rêve de la peau doucement, et souple.
Je rêve des gémissements remplis avec passion.
Je rêve des heures touchant, et longtemps des cheveux bouclés foncés.
Je rêve du temps, et à maintes reprises.

Jusqu’à ce que je me réveille… oh, nuit sacrée.

Love

Love

Love is the first kiss, the first touch, the passion; mmmm, the passion

Love is the tenderness that last for hours, the sharing, the talking, the experience

Love is the learning, the learning, the learning and …oh, the learning

Love is that powerful tearing in the heart when you go away

Love is the death, that thousand deaths when you may not be coming back

Love is the anger, the pain, the self-awareness found in agony of aloneness

Love is the death of the soul, the shattering of mirrors, the crushing of every hope

Love is finding, finding again, and finding again

Love is discovering that you are loved back

Love is the intensity of fucking as if it were the first time

Love is the binding of time, bodies and lives

Love is the arm wrestling of wills but the willingness to do the right thing for the family

Love is the breaking of pedestals and the tearing of veils

Love is the crushing of rose-colored glasses

Love is the intention, the commitment and the willingness to work it out

Love is holding hands as we share the sunset

And why not?

Why not? Why not accept joy, pure passion, and the deepest intensities of life? Who cares if anyone “deserves” anything; who cares if its unconventional, strange or simply intensely personal? Whether you believe this life is simply a transition to the next, or you believe that you relive lives over and over: why not grab what joy you can?

Well, sure, you have to look beyond the moment. You really have to see the possible paths to the future; and no, I’m not talking about any magical ability to know for certain what lottery numbers will win over the next ten years. I’m talking about the simple ability to understand possible consequences, and weigh them appropriately. But some joyful and passionate choices have built-in joyful possible consequences: such as love that leads to families and children brought up in households filled with adults who love them. With resources to expand their life choices, and to live in a place that is safe and surrounded by a community that cherishes them.

Sure, there are no absolutes. It might not work out. But unless we reach for the joy, reach for the glorious passion we need, reach out to another who will love, hold, cherish us deeply… someone who will see the glowing potential, and let us grow spiritually and emotionally upward and outward; unless we take the risks, we won’t find the joy.

Time For Health Care, Mr. Obama

Dear President Obama,

You have now sent the nation into place where is has never before been directed, financially speaking.  Your recovery strategy has spent billions, with results yet to be realized for the people.  You have kissed the cheeks of the Muslin Nations,bowed to various kings, and have spoken strongly to  North Korea for their dangerous games.  You have begun the apologies for, and withdrawal from, Iraq.  Overall, to paraphrase Saturday Night Live, you haven’t achieved anything yet.

But now it is time.  Time to turn away from the banks, from Wall Street, from the evil men and regimes that are scattered in the world around us.  Let your good people now focus on these things.  Time to focus on the health of the nation; the literal health.  With so many people still losing their jobs we find ourselves, as a nation, at higher and higher risk for illness, injury and death… because fewer of us have health insurance.

Time to make good on your health care promises.  Time to stop bending to your party’s favors that need to be repaid.

We need health care.  Not just reform.  Not just a moderate makeover that is forced through a gauntlet of powerful, influential, rich, corporations who contribute strongly to re-election campaigns.  Our doctors, our drug companies, our health clubs, our diet supplement companies… one sixth of our economy… is motivated, is DEPENDENT, on people being sick.  Staying sick.  Not dying, but continuing to consume drugs, require care, purchase health products.

Our current system is now overwhelmed… but is a huge money maker.  In fact, I would suspect that many many hospitals, doctors, and drug corporations are pretty happy with that fact.  To put it into manufacturing terms, the factory is at full production.

How do you stop this cycle?  I don’t have a clue.  Or maybe I do.  Perhaps what is vilified as a “single payer” model is the only way out.  I think that a low cost “insurance” option that incents the customers and the health care administrators to have people live healthily.  Perhaps it is also time to start advertising, as with cigarettes and alcohol, just how hazardous some of our foods and restaurants have become.  The movie “Food Inc.” illustrated very nicely some of the problems on that front.

Mr Obama, we know your powers of rhetoric are excellent.  You are sitting in the loudest bully pulpit of the world.  Why are you not speaking more strongly?

© AlasdairCelt 2009

Survival in the Obama Era

In today’s world at the tail end of the first decade in the 21st century, we have an interesting new set of problems, new threats, and new tools to help us deal with surviving disasters, major or minor.  Gone are the days when survival just meant being able to hunker down in an underground shelter with some food and water to wait for the fallout to pass, and radiation levels to drop.  The threat of an all-out nuclear holocaust is much less now than it has been in 50 years, but other threats have much greater odds.

Hard-core survivalists have, since the fall of the Soviet Union, found themselves with less  reason for storage of guns and materials.  It seemed that the whole survivalist culture might be going completely out of style.  Of course, 911 helped bolster this mentality, but for the most part the terrorist targets tended to be in major cities: places that survivalists generally avoid based on common sense.

The Obama Era has ushered in a new phase, however.  A super majority of Democrats in the house, and a citified Democrat in the office of the President, have lead to a general fear that, well, as a minimum there will be much greater federal gun control, and in a worst case will be a new socialist style government that will take our rights away even faster than the previous administration.

So now the survivalists have a new mission: so survive this administration.  Ammunition prices have skyrocketed as remaining stocks are purchased at rates not seen in years, and many guns are being sold out… especially the ones that have been labeled “assault rifles” by Democrats in the past, for fear of bans coming down fast and hard.  Freeze-dried food is now at post-911 prices, and the hard-core survivalists are once again planning for their bunkers: not for any Soviet threat, but to hide from a new Big Brother.

Is this a reasonable response?  No, I don’t think so.  I believe that our needs for survival preparation is still there, but I don’t believe that stockpiling freeze-dried food, hiding excess guns, or burying thousands of rounds of ammo is the best preparation for the possible critical events that could occur in the near future.  Not to say investing in guns and ammo would be a bad thing: sometimes guns can go way up in value, however, I think that we should spend our money and time in ways that maximize our survival, and long term success, in the case of things that  have higher odds of occurring:

GET INVOLVED.  Perhaps the cheapest and most effective survival technique is to be vocal and active in government.  The citizens who say nothing, who don’t write their congressmen, who don’t actively support their candidates… or even worse, who don’t vote… deserve what they get: governments with different values than their own.  You have to spend your time, and maybe even a few dollars in donations, to support the candidates that are willing to serve freedom over government protectionism. At the least, get a membership in the NRA if you want to keep your guns!  Because so few people actually get involved in government, your involvement is magnified 100fold.

PREPARE FOR THE REAL-WORLD THREATS – Sure there is a chance of widespread nuclear involvement, however the odds are small.  There are much larger chances for widespread, long term, power outages or a global pandemic… because we know these things have happened already, and still have a pretty good chance of happening again.  We know we can’t count on our government to save us: think back to Katrina… and our governor suggesting we stock “duct tape and plastic sheets” as a preparation for widespread biological attack.

SPEND WISELY – Perhaps if you are wealthy enough, you can build yourself a deluxe bunker in virgin Canadian forest AND stock it with 10 years of food.  Most of us, however, are not independently wealthy, and still have to put our pants on one leg at a time.  Our decisions to prepare for disastrous events just are not as important as say… our decision to pay our mortgage.  You pretty much have a 100% guarantee that if the mortgage doesn’t get paid, a disaster will occur, at least on a personal scale. .. and you’ll have to start looking for a new bunker.  You have to spend your distaster preparation dollars in ways that give them the best bang for the buck… and address the needs of our higher potential disasters.

More on this topic, perhaps coming out as a booklet with some great checklists… Get smart, get involved!

© AlasdairCelt 2009

God(s)

What is the nature of God?  Is there only one way of looking at the concept of God?  Which religion is “right”?  Which religion is wrong?

Does any of this conjecture really mean anything?  More than the barking of a dog?

Because, as hard as it is to imagine, if any one religion is correct, then the vast majority of the world is doomed to … well Hell.  Unless, of course, the religion that is “right” allows for lots and lots of other religions.  Which certainly would not be the case for most of them.

Of general religions, I am not an expert.  I only know of a few intimately, though I have read widely.  Having grown up as most in the United States, I was exposed to primarily one religion, and was taught to distrust, pity, and sometimes fear, all the others.  More people than not, I would suspect, grew up in a similar manner.  Even the atheists I have know seem to have been raised in the same manner, more or less, with “No Religion” as their religion.  Only through an open mind, much reading and a conscious decision to overcome a sense of cognitive dissonance do some people learn a broader sense of religions.  I have found most people don’t bother.  It is much easier to believe in “one” way.  Much much easier to fit into the society that immediately surrounds you.

Then, suddenly in the world sense of things, we have instant global communication.  The stricter old-school religions find themselves faced with well… facts that are uncomfortable, worldviews that are fiercely incompatible, and worst of all, exposure to thousands and thousands of other religions that compete with their belief systems.  The fiercer of these religions can either A) isolate their followers, or B) explain away the differences, or perhaps C) announce all-out warfare.  A good war always seems to drum up some additional support.  Just ask a few U.S. presidents.

So now here we stand.  The Far-Right whackos of one religion blowing themselves up to defeat the hated infidels, while the Far Right of one or two other religions secretly happy to have a war to fight.

Back to the question: What is the nature of God?  The sad part of this whole discussion, is perhaps the fact that the religions with the closest view of what God is tend to hate each other the most.

So I say this: Let the nature of God be bountiful, diverse, and without limits.  Let the nature of God(s) match what we understand as truth, but also what can be good for people, for families and for societies… even as we become a global society.

© AlasdairCelt 2009

Ah green man

Ah green man, ah green man,

Peering from the wood

Dark eyes stare into mine

Beneath the sylvan hood

~

With wooden nuts and wilted stem

God, or monster, or simply fool

With silly crown of leaves enrapt

Our reflection from a darkened pool

~

The tilted shuffling walks

The aimless rambling rants

But reflect a distant spark

Mirrored within the cants

~

For beneath that shadowed mask

The greenwoods deep doth hide

Within that robe so lightly worn

Great powers strain to ride

~

Harken me, you Greenmen boys

Who don the leathern mask

The darker gods may yet call

And you won’t like what they ask

© Alasdaircelt 2009

Magic

Magic

What is magic?  Arthur C. Clarke in his Third Law of Prediction said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.  This a greater truth, in my mind, perhaps than anything else Mr. Clarke has said.  It creates for me the definition of magic: “Magic is any technology sufficiently advanced so as to not be understood”.

There have been distinguished scientists, not too long ago, who claimed that all that was worth learning has already been learned.  Most people know now that this concept is bunk, for myself, the longer I live, the more I realize how little we really know about the world.  Do you think I’m wrong?  Especially, most especially, we know so little about the human mind and the human body: the heart of what is traditionally know as magic.  Amazingly we ignore the most powerful positive effects on the human body: the human mind.  Not only we ignore this effect, our medical establishment consistently denies it, and works to filter it out of every clinical trial.  We affectionately call it “The Placebo Effect”; yet this effect is the most powerful, and arguably the oldest medicine know to mankind.

Magic.  The magic of the druids, medicine men, and shamans is perhaps centered, (along with herbal lore), the placebo effect.  By helping the mind heal the body, these ancient traditions utilized…magic…in a way that our modern medical establishment ignores.  This magic is still barely understood.  Indeed, our general understanding of the human mind and psyche seems very primitive.  I once knew a brain surgeon who bemoaned the fact that most of his patients died or lost much of their “self”.  As he put it, he was only called in when the odds were already long: when the tumor was already large, or the damage extensive.  His primitive scalpel was as libel to carve out vital elements of humanity as it was to solve the problem.

Magic.  Perhaps the most interesting and powerful magic is the magic of positive leadership, sometimes called “group dynamics” or perhaps “mob psychology”.  The magic that launches ships to far lands, the magic that lead to our reaching the moon.  For good, and just as often for evil, this magic has perhaps changed the face of mankind.  This magic was well understood in the past, among the Greeks and Romans.  We modern humans have made some vast improvements in the methods… but we have NOT much improved the basic elements: the magic of leadership.

Magic.  We have among us a powerful magician.  A man who was able to grab the interest of the people, who was able to leap ahead in a field filled with serious entrenched partisans and even depose the anointed Democratic Heir.  The question is, does he know that he has magic?  Does he recognize his leadership magic; his own powerful and only vaguely understood abilities to convince the people?  So far, I would say “NOT”.  He acts as though his role of the president is functional and political.  Perhaps he believes his rise in leadership was completely based on his own, and his team’s, unique skills.  With only a thin smokescreen of bi-partisanship, he advocates for the Democratic Party, supporting their plans through his budgets.  Even worse, he uses his magic to tell us how BAD things have gotten in order to convince us all to spend so much of or nation’s future money.  He seems to be using his magic to get his way in congress, but a side effect is a further depression of the economy.

Magic 101: A Negative Message Is The Easiest Message, and The Most Powerful, But It Often Reflects Back Onto You: Sometimes 100 Fold.  Stop with the negative messages, Mr. Obama.  Step up to the plate, and start with the positive messages.  The financial markets are in tatters, and running scared from “Democrat Wealth Destruction” policies that seem to be in the works.  Spend a few days, spend some of your precious magical energy, ON Wall Street, really LISTENING to the issues.  Wall Street holds the life blood of big and small businesses alike, as well as a huge percentage of Americans who have any kind of retirement fund.   You should be able to afford the time: there is no single thing more important to America right now than our economy.  Remember, YOUR TIME and YOUR ATTENTION is where your magic goes…

© AlasdairCelt 2009

Freedom

Freedom

“Freedom is a much touted and little used luxury”

We believe our freedoms, as Americans, are precious.  In fact, it is perhaps the single defining American ideal.  Freedom, especially freedom of religion, is what many immigrants came here in search of.  Freedom was defined by “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” by our founding fathers who referred to the “rights of the people” as self-evident.

Yet in recent years we have repeatedly let seeming “well meaning” legislatures and power-hunger government entities erode our freedoms.  Why, are we so quick to give our freedoms away?

You don’t believe me?  Let me offer some examples:

Search & Arrest: Fear is probably the greatest power of tyrants in all of history.  Through fear can the minority control vast regions.  Through fear, even in our democracy, a government could gain powers well beyond those that the founding fathers found acceptable.  The founding fathers felt strongly that our individual rights to NOT have our “persons, houses, papers, and effects” searched without probably cause “supported by Oath or affirmation”.  They knew that through fear tactics, tyrannical government could exert controls that would suppress democracy.  They had personal experience with this.  Technology has changed since the 18th Century, but people have, for the most part, not changed.  By giving the government the ability to peer into our houses, our persons, our communications, electronically or through other high-tech methods, we have given away one of our most fundamental rights.  A president that espouses these actions, from domestic wiretaps to email scanning to high tech scanning of people’s houses, is directly attacking one of our basic individual rights under out constitution; and is setting up a government with powers rife with potential abuse.

Freedom of Speech: Perhaps one of our least trammeled rights, the right to freedom of speech, is in jeopardy again.  Democrats, in an effort to suppress the vocal opposition to their policies in talk radio, plan on doing something called the “Fairness Doctrine”, which would take away the rights of a radio host to express his opinion… without having some government defined “alternative opinion” being given equal airtime.  First of all, if the government is involved in determining what speech is fair, how can that be anything but censorship?  As well, how many issues have just two possible viewpoints?  This thinly veiled effort to suppress the conservative voice will backfire on the Democrats if the conservatives get back into power.  It’s a huge attack against another of our basic rights.  With the myriad of new communications technologies, perhaps it is time to ramp down the FCC’s control over the airwaves.  For myself, I have always wondered about the standards that allow horrible depravity and murders, yet vilify the image of a woman’s breast.  Are these really the values that America wishes to support?

Rights in Criminal Cases: “No person… shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”.  How is that we can do this simply by labeling them a “terrorist”.  I was horrified by a “homeland security” television show recently.  In case after case, what was simply a crime in the past, became a “terrorist act” or something that “supported terrorism”.  Our government, using the specter of 9/11, has made it OK to take away rights simply by labeling a crime differently.  As well, please notice that our wise founding fathers did NOT make the caveat “No person who is a US citizen”.  No, they made these laws to bind the actions of our government against all “persons”, no matter their race, religion or national origins.  How can we accept the actions of Guantanamo Bay, of overseas CIA interrogation facilities, and worst of all, the incarceration and isolation of our own citizens without having any due process of law?  This is not a new approach.  Ever since we started our “war on drugs”, we have considered it OK to deprive people of their constitutional rights when we seize cars and houses simply because the crime involved drugs “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”.  Simply by vilifying a particular crime, we have found it acceptable to give away our rights…and reduce our freedoms as a nation.

Freedom of Religion: We should have freedom to practice religions and be treated the same under law by federal, state and local government no matter what religion is practiced.  Yet our states consistently suppress religions through their marriage laws.  Only officials from “established churches” approved by the state are allowed to perform marriages in many states.  How is this not the enforcement of a state-defined “acceptable religions”?  Perhaps our states should get completely out of the “marriage” business.  Leave the religious marriage in the hands of religions, and let the state manage the contractual agreement.

The Right To Bear Arms:  Well, I won’t go much into this one.  Suffice to say that this is a freedom that we have now, in most places, but is under constant pressure by well-meaning individuals… and under a Democrat government, may well be lost forever.  It doesn’t take a genius to see that gun control, where implemented, has had little effect on real crime rates.  Take away a population’s legal guns, however, and you have a population that is a lot more easily controlled: by governments and criminals.

As I went through these examples, you can see that the destruction of our freedom is being orchestrated by both Liberals and Conservatives, Democrats and Republicans.  Each of these didactic institutions cares less about American Freedoms than they care about their own ideals and party power.  Each of them would willingly destroy freedoms in order to stay in power… for our own good, they tell us.  The blood of patriots was shed for our freedoms, over and over.  How can we support politicians who vote our freedoms away, piece-by-piece, year-by-year, for a tiny bit more perceived security?  How can we support parties that weigh their own partisan needs greater than basic rights that our founding fathers died for?

© AlasdairCelt 2009

The Obama Nation, Chapter Two: Strike One: Mr. Obama, Strike One: Democratic House

Well, the Obama nation is beginning to fade.  So far his colors are still vibrant, but a savvy eye can begin to see the hints of a color shift.  Mr. Obama has made his first major blunder in the public eye.  Some of his cabinet selections ran fast and loose with their own finances; just as all partisan players, Democrat and Republican, tend to run fast and loose with the truth in politics.

Perhaps this was not entirely a mistake by Mr. Obama.  Perhaps he knew some of his partisan selections were going to crash and burn under public scrutiny.  Perhaps he was simply clearing the way of required political “favors owed” so that he could be free to select the candidates who might support him directly, rather than partisan stalwarts.  We can only hope.

As well, the Democratic House has made their first major blunder by passing something they called an “economic stimulus” that does not seem to have any innovative ideas, and perhaps very little real stimulation.  The bill, instead, seems to prop up the same failing institutions that got us into this mess… as well as a lot of cash for the Democrat’s favorite programs.  Most people have not read this bill; perhaps even the very people speaking to you about it on the evening news.  I have.  You should too.  Check it out at:

http://appropriations.house.gov/pdf/PressSummary01-15-09.pdf

It contains stuff like “saving public sector (government) jobs”, plus plenty of favorites that may have an effect in the long term (more money for education, arts, infrastructure, & technology) but only a few line items that seem to have any possibility of some short term and medium term (IE the next 5-10 years) effect.  How can they call this a “Stimulus Package”?  Call it instead, “The Democratic Wet Dream Bill” that allows them to mortgage our economic future under the guise of our current emergency.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m all for infrastructure, technology support, and education.  But I think that we should do these things when we can afford them, in the open, and NOT try to fool the American public into thinking that this pile of pork and very long-term investments is something that it is definitely NOT.

So WHAT, might you ask, WILL stimulate the economy?  If the government spends a bunch of money on the arts, for instance, won’t that help?  The answer, of course, is “most likely not”.  Each tax dollar you take away from a citizen or a business keeps those entities from potentially spending those dollars on some thing else.  So, every dollar sucked out of your and my pocket keeps us from buying the widget we have had our eyes on, that would support our local retailer, that would support some manufacturing company somewhere, that would support their suppliers, and so on.

Not only does the government take this dollar from us to keep us from spending it the way WE want, they skim off the top up to some 40% to 60% for their big bureaucratic expenses.  What the artist sees at the back end of this process is only a portion of your dollar.  About the only clear winners in this game are the handful of artists and helpers who are lucky (and politically correct enough) to be “stimulated”.

Government actions that can stimulate an economy must go far beyond simply spending taxpayer dollars.

So WHAT, might you ask again, WILL stimulate the economy?  Well, I don’t claim to be an economist.  I say that proudly, because economists seem to be a pack of drunken lemurs that have more internal strife and general disagreement than…  well than the Democratic Party.  My view of the economy is simple: we are like a giant traffic jam…  say, a giant traffic jam on the beltway that surrounds Washington DC.  Filled with cars and trucks of all sizes, the cops are trying to get people moving.  We haven’t completely stopped; we are all creeping along.  As more cars and trucks break down or run of gas, the road slows down even more.  Sure, you could eventually open up a short-term space on one end of the beltway by building a big new section of roadway; sure you could make a special lane for “artists cars and government workers”, but the rest of us will still be plodding along as our radiators burst or our gas tanks run dry.

To stimulate this traffic jam of an economy, you have go to do several things at once.

1)    First, and foremost, you have to remove as many roadblocks as you can.  Get rid of the construction sites during rush hour; focus on using the roadway you have when you need it most.  Red tape and as much tax as possible should be removed.  Businesses & investors, the big and small trucks, are the lifeblood of the economy because they make the jobs that everyone lives on… so you have to give them room.  Perhaps you need to make a special lane for them.  Perhaps you need to create a fast-lane national fund to stimulate small and medium sized businesses, and make the process to get the loan a quick one.  A low-interest loan fund for small business would create millions of vital new jobs within weeks.  Bailing out the automotive industry simply saves thousands doomed jobs for a little time.
2)    Tow Away The Creeping Hulks.  Certainly don’t throw money at just the massive, rusty, badly maintained tandem trucks of the automotive industry and banks on Wall Street!  You need to create stimulus across the board.  Letting these huge broken down behemoths trundle along the road instead getting them off the road (and then just letting them get towed) is a mistake.  Someone else, some savvy entrepreneur in a fleet of small trucks, will take their space if given half a chance, and the economy will run better for it.
3)    Get the cops out there to direct traffic, speak confidently, and enforce the laws!  Pull over the speeders, those expensive sports-car businesses that willfully played games which threatened the economic safety of us all, and keep them off the road.  Create a positive mood.  Let people know where they can get into detours and alternate routes.  Get linked up with other roadways, other national governments, to encourage more global trade.  The more we lock down the borders of our roadways, the more gridlock is created.  We live in a global economy now, like it or not.

Will these steps really work?  I don’t know for sure, but I sure have spent enough time in traffic jams.  And I think that my approach has as much merit as any of the drunken lemur economists.

A final note to President Obama

Dear Mr. President,
You are still in a position to create the positive mood, which will help encourage the traffic of the economy.  You, more than anyone else in the entire nation, have the positive will of the majority of the nation behind you NOW, FOR A LIMITED TIME.

So, PLEASE, Mr. Obama, stop playing partisan politics.  Please start working with the smart players of both parties.  Work with the Senate to strip the 2009 stimulus bill of everything except that which will truly stimulate, and add in more real stimulation.

Because now even more we need you, your vision, and your powers of inspirational leadership.  Because we are now still, for a limited time, your Obama Nation.

© AlasdairCelt 2009