Thursday, June 30, 2011

The Restoration of the Hawaiian Monarchy (It's Not What You Had in Mind)

It's a good time for all those teachers (government workers) who have been "sacrificing" themselves for the keiki and everybody else -- to move on and grab those comparable worth jobs getting everything they truly deserve as...?

All government jobs were meant to be positions people served temporarily in and rotated among the full constituency -- as truly representative of that society, and not become personal fiefdoms and lifetime entitlements for those who always wish to be in charge at the top serving themselves --"for everybody else."

There should be term limits for all government workers -- as well as the politicians, otherwise we're right back where we started centuries ago, with the monarchies and empires.

Now Hawaii has gotten their wish to restore the Hawaiian monarchy -- but it is not as they had in mind.

Long live King Abercrombie!

Sure, everybody wants more for themselves as their permanent lot in life -- living happily forever after, with no problems like everybody else (the less deserving), but life doesn't play out that way. Everybody will have to make a few changes and adjustments sometimes in their lives -- and the more often they've done it, the better they become at recreating and rejuvenating their lives.

A few get crushed and lose their way in life, and even their desire to continue, the first time they are faced with the "challenge of change," and just don't know how life is possible beyond the one way they thought and taught it would always be for themselves -- because it had always been that way before.

But time and life marches on, and one day they wake up and look in that full-length mirror, and realize they are not the person they thought they were -- and would always remain so, and that was the whole role and purpose of government -- to ensure them that permanence. But life also means death too -- and being reborn into an even greater life. That is the legacy of our culture -- that there is always life beyond, and a greater one for those who venture beyond to discover it -- even if they have to create it themselves, by pioneering it.

And that's where we are today -- like every other time in history with their unique challenges of their times. In the past century, it was often just surviving wars, persecutions and purges that took hundreds of millions of lives. Before that, one could add the perils of famines, diseases, natural calamities in addition to the manmade ones.

So we are living in extraordinary times -- like every other, and not that these are the worst of times -- like no other before. In fact, even at its worst, these are still the best of times -- but not to those who believed their niches in life were secure, inviolable and sacrosanct -- and now they have to adjust to a new reality, that others have confronted all along.

The natural consequence of mandated universal education is that eventually everybody is educated who wants to be, and those who don't or can't, won't be no matter how much money society and government throws at it -- because money is not the answer. It is the proper understanding of life that is -- and not just the perpetuation of the old ignorance masquerading as the knowledge we all need to subscribe to.

In that way, the time, energy and resources can be applied to the new challenges of the present times -- which are the problems of ensuring only the well-being of government workers rather than the public at large -- at every level.

Long live King Abercrombie!

(Sadly, the Honolulu-Star-Advertiser is still "editing, censoring, suppressing" Hawaii's most influential blogger, to ensure that the people continue to be kept in the dark (ages) in Hawaii.)

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Seeing the Light

The people who have made a science of growing (medical) marijuana indoors, know that there are two requirements for growing (beneficial) light — range (spectrum) and intensity (power).

Usually what is referred to as “artificial” light, is Edison's original incandescent light or the original fluorescents — which if they tried to grow plants, would fail to do so either — because they lack the necessary spectrum and power. So to compare that light with sunlight, is not an equivalent — but if they start talking about halides and the latest state of the art lighting, then it approximates natural (sun)light, including those tanning bulbs — that cause tanning, while you can lie naked under a regular lightbulb all your life and not get any tanning (substantive) effect.

And particularly important is that range and intensity of light to health and growth of the eye and brain — despite optometrists (eye doctors) saying "light doesn't matter." That is what you're seeing — some people more sensitive to these differences than others, just as some people can hear ranges of sound beyond what others can, or sense anything else (taste, smell, touch).

There's a tendency among the social scientists (the politically correct) to make an equivalency of everything — so that no distinctions (and discrimination) of anything anymore, is possible.

In many cases, a person just needs to optimize the lighting, not to need glasses — as often is the case when one uses an Ott light. Another alternative technology that works is the use of a pin-hole (reading glass) instead of the polished optical glass — that many find helpful staring at computer screens all day, in reducing eye strain. Again, many optometrists (eye doctors) insist that it's not possible or doesn't make a difference when even they use a pinhole instrument to first detect whether one’s vision problem is refractive or eye disease of greater seriousness.

Other vision experts have claimed that they can correct vision defects with the proper training in how to see correctly — because all of our organs don't come with instruction manuals on how to use them properly, correctly and optimally, as most people have to discover on their own — or not.

That is often the case with one’s muscular development, as well as mental development, social, psychological, moral, spiritual, etc. Most often, we learn from those around us — but whole social strata (ghettoes) can often be dysfunctional in that way. That is a common cause of behavioral problems like obesity, addictions, codependencies and mental health (psychopathological) issues.

We need more discrimination and discernment in these matters -- and not the denial that anything, anymore, can make a difference -- and everything doesn't matter, so "why should I care?"

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Quality of Life

Probably the greatest predictor of future success, is present success; that is to say, if one is doing well presently, the chances of that continuing, is good, but if one isn't doing so well presently, one should have a great sense of urgency for making it work now -- as the indicator for one's chances in the future.

People who find a way to solve their problems presently, as they have done in the past previously, have a track record of success -- no matter how daunting the future may look, while those presently floundering, have obviously not solved the problems of the past, hence their present difficulties.

Undoubtedly the greatest factor, is their health and well-being as the foundation and bottom line of their successful adaptation to the challenges of their existence, which should not be a great deterrent -- but that which is the most accessible and easy to secure, and if one can't do that, then one has some serious issues and problems to overcome.

Of course there are unforeseeable and unavoidable calamitous events, but still for the most part, one's baseline health and well-being, are largely one's own doing and control, even despite the current fashion of denying accountability for any and all things. "Bad things
just happen, and good things just happen -- and there's nothing one can do about it."

That is the pre-scientific, pre-industrial medieval mindset -- perpetrated by the
liberal arts institutions that regard knowledge just for its own sake, because there is nothing one can actually do with that knowledge to make any difference in the world they actually live in. Their knowledge has a much higher and noble purpose of knowledge for its own sake -- and not that low-brow practical stuff of mere mortal minds -- using it for its own benefits. "The higher truths, should know and serve no masters -- and especially to reality itself."

So without that connection between thought and actuality (reality), any truth becomes totally arbitrary -- subject to whomever controls the means (media) for its dissemination. If a low quality of life is "paradise," then that's what it is -- no questions asked, and nothing can be expected.


So why should we care? -- it won't make a difference.

Saturday, June 04, 2011

We Have to Get Better

The writing has been on the wall for quite some time now -- that we can't simply continue to provide for the care of a population that continues to get worse, and need more enablers in that manner.

Undoubtedly, modern technology and medicine, can sustain life far beyond the point at which it would have long ago perished -- but is that the best use of that knowledge, or would it be better to apply that skill to improving the highest end of actualizations instead? Otherwise, the healthy and able are consumed entirely, in caring for the increasingly many, who merely exist -- without any quality of life anymore, including all their own most personal functions -- of eating and elimination, and little more beyond that besides exhibiting the most primitive "vital signs" -- not including any cognitive recognition of any distinctive life that identified them as human personalities.

A large part of it, is enabling those lifestyles -- as though it were still the primitive times in which the only use one had for prosperity and abundance, was its insatiable consumption -- of food, shelter, clothing, transportation (travel) -- without qualitative improvements beyond that.

And when one thoughtfully examines the great crises of these times -- those are the problems, disruptions and challenges of the modern era -- in obesity, real estate speculations and the resulting homelessness, the wastage of resources as fuel -- in highly consumptive lives. Meanwhile, there is no or little thought given, to creating more resources and reserves (capital), instead of depleting them -- ever more widely and equally. It was a bad idea when even a few could do it -- and not a better idea, when everyone else felt just as entitled to do the same.

But instead of simply answering "More," as the solution to every problem, an obviously better idea should be, "How can we do it differently?" That should be the end result of education and society (culture), and not simply, "How can we do more?" -- of what is turning out to be the problems and crises of the foreseeable future.

Of course there is an irresolvable problem as many more people keep getting worse, as many people live longer lives, and fewer die prematurely because of global wars, disease, persecutions, purges and famines -- but those are the opportunities for people also to get unprecedentedly better -- than they ever have been before -- and not just within the parameters of the old "normal."

Initially, new technologies make more possible -- but that serves to create the critical mass from which different and better, become the new imperatives -- and not just more of the old ways of doing things, whether it be education or health care in the old manner of needing it evermore. At some point, more of the old health care, has to morph into better health -- requiring less of the traditional health care. That is the difference between enabling and empowering.

"Enabling" requires more manpower and labor for problems that simply get worse -- while "empowering" means those old problems go away, because they're not enabled to continue -- and multiply out of control, and create evermore (high-paying) jobs to have to deal with them. Instead, a society awakens to realize they could do something better with those resources, time, energy and attention.

But the institutions exist primarily to defend that status quo, and its hierarchies of people who profit from it -- greatly, because they are conditioned to. They will insist that the problems are immutable and essential "human nature," that must not be violated -- all the while lamenting that more money should be funneled that way -- because the students are having a more difficult time learning than they ever had before -- because now there is so much more to learn, rather than less, or people can be sustained for longer at even more irrecoverable and hopeless conditions.

Human civilization advances when there are less rules to learn because the rules they do learn, are much more valuable, valid and versatile. Thus, one no longer has to learn a hundred or a thousand different truths (facts), but the one that implies and from which one can deduce the others -- as one really needs to -- and not just learn a thousand things for the day one will need to recall the one, which of course, is the old model (paradigm) of learning many so-called educators are still propagating as the same need as valuable as a hundred or a thousand years ago.

In fact, such people still insist that one has to learn all the old, before one can learn the new -- or the present state-of-the-art. If that were true, than one would first have to own and operate a Model T before one could board a space shuttle, had to have operated a hand-crank telephone in order to qualify for the latest iPhone/iPad, and had to attain the status of a "successful person" of the last century, in order to live life at its highest possibilities of actualization with all the knowledge and wisdom now available to everybody -- and not just the bureaucracies that controlled them for their own exclusive benefit previously.

That is the reality of these times crumbling before the eyes of the defenders of the status quo -- to their great bewilderment. Something terrible is happening to their old worldview, and something marvelous and wonderful is taking its place -- without their permission, knowledge, and control.