Conrad Memories from the Future

  When I brought this topic to the group, I realized that the choice between morality and transactions is not actually binary, as you will soon see.  With few exceptions, none of us could be defined strictly as either/or and most human interaction is based in both.  First, let's focus on some more precise definitions so that we can work with clarity. Morality is defined as  principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior. The  definition  of  transactional  is something related to a process or other action. An example of  transactional  is the process to negotiate a contract between two people. In America, these have become some very important understandings of interactions during a time of great potential for change, either to the beneficial or to the destructive.  That is coupled with extraordinary need brought on by a pandemic coupled with environmental crisis and very real threats to our de...

  This is my current reading material in terms of books and e-readers.  As you can see, I am an ambibliophile - a totally made up word - who will read from the source that suits me.  The bound book contains ten novels that comprise a series.  The Kindle e-reader I share a library with my wife and my neighbor - with Amazon's blessing, by the way - contains 3,0000+ novels currently.  No preference, but I find the Kindle quite handy and much more convenient to hold and cart around.  My luggage won't hold 3,000+ novels, nor will my book shelves. My wife on the other hand is reading solely from a bound book she borrowed from my Kindle neighbor's wife.  It is what she likes most. I could end this blog piece right here, for I've told my essential stance.  Read the way you like, when you like.  I have no bias except the practical.  But ... I have other friends who feel that there is something special about the bound book, the smell, the feel of ...

The Thinker upper body as sketched by me for this blog piece. Sanjana has set me thinking.  She threw me a wicked googly!  At first, it seems to me that asking the question of philosophy and what it means to me is like asking how significant air is in my life.  Where to start? Reduction!  There is too much that philosophy seems to cover in my head. I must reduce that to specifics, something that I can actually talk about without lapsing into poetic wonder.  Ah!  A dictionary definition ... a search for a general understanding of values and reality by chiefly speculative rather than observational means So, I've cherry picked from many definitions available.  Other definitions dealt with wisdom or the specific studies you might see in a class listing, but I've chosen to reduce it to the specific realm of the pure thinker, the mental learner and wanderer.  Science folds in afterward with its processing of observations by theorizing, experimentation...

Our work was hard, working with emotionally disturbed children in a residential facility.  It was a particularly bad day at work.  So bad, I won't even discuss it here.  That bad ... My apartment mate and I decided to meet with a fellow child care worker - that I just happened to be attracted to - at a coffee shop in Berkeley to unravel what had happened.  The bonus would be that this was the first time I had gotten together with her outside work.  I needed this! She called us at the coffee shop and said a friend of hers going all the way back to Kindergarten was coming early to meet her.  Would it be ok if the four of us just got together at another place, a Mexican restaurant and bar, to just relax and unwind.  We said sure. So, my friend and I got to the restaurant first.  When the two ladies walked in, I was dazzled!  Not by the lady I was after, the friend with her.  We had a delightful evening of conversation and she was as enjoyab...

  Showcased at the Lick Observatory is a glass bookcase with Willy Ley books displayed.  Heaven! This is a map to Mt. Hamilton 50 miles from our house.  It is the home of the famed Lick Observatory.  Willy Ley was part of the German scientific diaspora around the rise of Nazi fascism.  Some stayed loyal to the Fatherland, but others abhorred it, Ley being one.  In 1944 he became an American citizen.  In 1949 a young American citizen was born in the American heartland and he was introduced to Ley through his books.  A love affair began! As a child in 3rd or 4th grade, I was fascinated by Golden Books talking of the Solar System and books by Willy Ley!  Ley was not just a writer, he began as a real and renowned scientist in his own right.  Many of his books were written in collaboration with the great Werner Von Braun, the father of NASA rocketry.  Together, they presented a clear vision of the future of space exploration. So, I was a...

Looking at what the pandemic has brought, it has brought pain, death to many and tragic loss to families, isolation of those needing human touch.  Still, there is a silver lining that emerges from all the dark clouds of adversity in life and I sat back this morning to see if I could peg a few that have appeared in my world. I think it brought the end of the Trump Presidency .  I know some will be offended by me seeing that as positive, but so be it.  We all have to stand somewhere. Patience , for all else would be futile negativity.  It's amazing what you can develop, sometimes against your own nature, when there is no good alternative.  Some have chosen to stay impatient and declare their freedom in the face of this ... at the significant risk not just to themselves, but to others.  I turn my back on their selfishness. Reflection and time to consider with little interference .  With nothing filling your day, activity and tasks to accomplish, it becom...

I have never responded to a topic suggested for our group like I have to this one.  Ramana suggested the topic and it is a worthy one.  However, my response will be short for personal reasons. For seven years, my dear daughter has been afflicted with an illness syndrome still not solved.  The nature and extent of it she could tell if she so chose, but I will not do so myself out of respect for the extremity she faces so bravely and respect for her privacy. My job is to stay steady and true until a solution is complete. I will, though, visit my other blogging mates at their sites to see what they have to say.  I encourage you to do the same at: Maria Padmum Raju Ramana Sanjana Shackman Srinivas

Padmini has brought us a topic oh-so-Indian today and I sit at the disadvantage of being surrounded by Indians as I write upon it.  Surrounded by Indians?  Where have I heard that before?  But, I digress ... I am neither Indian nor Hindu (in this life), but I rather like many of their concepts of the universe.  It is simply a statement that not being born to that tradition and teaching, I can only approach the ideas from a Western perspective, being American.  So, rather than being helpless, I approach it from the perspective I am born and bred to, the study of Physics, using its understandings to approach one of the core concerns for all beings, the question of what does all that happens to me come from and what is its meaning. Padmini picks the dilemma well, for it is argument between the accidental universe with randomly created physical laws and results and the argument of meaning in greater depth in the affairs of man.  In the first case, events just h...

  A true global pandemic in modern times is a rarity, especially one claiming so many lives, although the HIV/AIDS pandemic has claimed 30 million lives.  Each brings humanity itself into a glaringly sharp focus hidden during calmer times. AIDS is a nasty example of how we cheaply and cruelly protect our psyches.  We compartmentalized and made it a gay man's disease and thus, those of us straight could conveniently set aside emotional trauma.  It affects THEM, not us! That cheap compartmentalization comes with a price, a price of bigotry and cruelty, a price of the loss of part of our human compassion.  It is easier for those who have already compromised those qualities, but it is common to many.  It is especially easier to cast evil and stress onto someone we already have decided was evil anyway, such as the judgment of evil on the gay man. Covid-19 had an evil straw man in America, the entire Chinese population.  Every time it is referred to by a lea...

  Many sit in awe of our universe, me included, and others think it is ... well, it just is!  It colors our view of space exploration, an expensive proposition from either view.  After all, don't we have enough problems right here on Earth to deal with without some pie in the sky (or beyond) expenditure with no guarantee of either success or tangible benefit? Personally, I have learned to understand and even appreciate the priorities of those questioning such expenditures.  It has taken me a while to get past my childhood dreams of someday watching our trips to outer space and learning what we find there.  And when I'm talking about childhood, I'm talking about pretty early childhood coming from my primary grades.  When I learned to read, I read my Golden Books on the Solar System and my Willey Ley books on our first trip to the moon.  College years honed my appreciation of the actual science behind that exploration - I was a Physics major - and simult...

  Above you see the look of the times.  It has taken its toll on all of us.  The picture is of individuals, individuals working to be brave - although a bit foolish, for they are too close together - and this is what we see continuously and have for over a year.  Individuals under stress, coping. But, individuals together form families, form businesses, form communities, form nations, form a world.  Individuals compete for life meaning and sustenance and space with other individuals, with other families, with other ... and on and on.  They also cooperate all up the line in a constant give and take that composes the activity of life. Saints are born from the giving of life to others, despots from its theft.  Every level of organization continuously participates in the dance.  A pandemic puts all this in perspective, for all the human striving, something so simple as a mindless virus exposes vulnerabilities organic, social and international.  I...

Sales and politics have many nuances and definitions, but for the purposes of today's topic, I narrow them to these two definition from Merriam Webster: Sales : the development of a belief in the truth , value, or desirability of: gaining acceptance of. Politics : the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy. So, politics is really a specialized, focused type of sales.  A politician is a developer of belief in the value or desirability of a governmental policy and a developer of the belief in the truth of his/her supported positions to the public, to his/her constituents.  So, that obviously being fair, how could such a system ever go wrong!? The rub comes when the belief in truth isn't actually the full factual truth.  If I convince you to buy a used car from me by convincing you to believe that the engine is in perfect condition with at least 100.000 miles left in its life, it does you no good if, after paying a reasonable price for a car...

 I'm retired.  Newly retired. Not that anyone is counting, but I've been retired for ... ... approximately. Breaktime?  You know how it is when you are new at something and trying to build a new psychological infrastructure.  It is amateur hour for a while.  You're used to having markers and mileposts indicating flow and directionality.  You go to work on these days.  You go to your mother-in-law's house to care for her on the weekends.  Your wife comes home at a certain time from her work. What happens when those markers and mileposts are removed, erased?  You retire.  Your mother-in-law has a heart attack that very day and your are now staying with your wife at her mother's mobile home while you shepherd her through rehab and relocation to a care facility.  And now you settle in to all those hobbies and things you never had the time to develop. And a novel coronavirus appears and it seems like it is causing local trouble in China....

We've all felt something just beyond our reach, something we almost saw, an impression that seemed to come from nowhere.  Is someone there?  Hello?  And, isn't it interesting how much more intense that gets when the sun has set and we are alone!  We are alone, aren't we??? The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary  identifies  midnight  as the time when witches are supposedly active.  This is popularly known as the witching hour!  Supposedly, this is when the veil between the worlds is the thinnest, when the bleedthroughs are common, when spirits can migrate and shadows can be cast.  It is the time of magic! On the calendar, it is the death of one day, the birth of a new one.  Sometimes the opposite of the birth of magic, it can be the loss just as well, the coach reverting to a pumpkin, the horses to mice.  Fortunately, some things like glass slippers seem to survive the transition, although the magic that allows you to dance in them ...

Solitude has been posed as a solution to oh-so-much insanity in our lives.  After all, Sartre in his play No Exit concluded that "Hell is other people."  In his play, a poor guy dies to find himself in a beautifully appointed room with everything you could want and he shares it with two gorgeous women!  He at first thinks that he has obviously gone to Heaven and at first it seemed so.  They make love and enjoy one another's company enormously. Then, he finds he can't actually leave the room and neither can they.  Worse, he finds that he can't even close his eyes, let alone sleep.  Now the terror starts, when he realizes that this is his situation for eternity, never to be alone again, never to have solitude. So, what is it that makes it so bad?  Well, solitude is when a person can settle and listen to their own inner voice.  Even the quiet of perfect meditation is an inner listening of sorts not possible in a truly shared environment.  For w...

I did not believe how easily the Republican establishment, people who had been in Washington for a long time and had professed a belief in certain institutional values and norms, would just cave. You think about John McCain: For all my differences with him, you would not have seen John McCain excuse a president cozying up to Vladimir Putin, or preferring Russian interpretations of events over those of his own intelligence agencies. And to see figures in the Republican Party do a complete 180 on everything they claimed to believe previously is troubling.  -- Barack Obama True democracies, modern or not, don't fail.  I know that sounds extreme and a bit insane, but here is my reason for believing it.  Democracies don't fail, but the people in a democracy can.  America is right on the edge of seeing whether we will fail or not. Our democracy has been wrapped in too much myth and hasn't been seen as clearly as it should be.  We have heroes of our democracy and that ...