WHERE DOES GOD COME FROM?

you can't find the reasons why people believe in god by looking out at the cosmos because they are not out there. if you want to know why people persist in believing in a god or gods you must look inward to the study of human personality because in there is where the reasons can be found. look at personality genetics and the evolution of life on earth, the history of life and man, if you really want to know.

WRITING LIKE CEZANNE

people have fear. 
animals. 
people are animals. 
animals have fear. 
insects. 
insects are animals. 
fish are animals. 
all animals. 
all animals fear.

BREADTH

i love the night
i love the stars
they aren't just wallpaper

MONEY IS SPEECH VS SPEECH IS MONEY

i took my speech into the walmart the other day to buy some stuff but they wouldnt sell me any. no matter how much i tried to explain to them about the Supreme Court, the final arbiter in the land, and about how their decisions were binding on all the citizens of the country, they just wouldn't listen to reason.

amazing that a bunch of ten dollar employees could think they know better than the highest authority the law allows. talk about the emperor's new clothes — how is he going to talk his way into a new suit in this kind of place? 

maybe somebody ought to mention to the court how thin the robes have got lately.

FISH IN A BARREL

what do you think of a government that shoots fish in a barrel?

what do you think of israel?

PLAIN SPEECH PLAIN TRUTH

i was approached on the ferry going home recently by a petitioner with a document to sign. it was protesting the move by the government to allow pipelines across canada from the tar sands in alberta to the west coast, then in tankers down the coast to american refineries. i said i agreed that was not in our interests and would sign it but that it was futile, a pathetic effort really compared to the forces arrayed against it in favor of the pipelines and tankers. what i wanted to sign, might even be willing to work for, was a move to get the money out of politics. money is not speech. that is only one of a growing list of grievous  errors made by the worst supreme court in american history, a court which also reinforces another grievous error committed in the early days of the twentieth century, by affirming that corporations are people, with all the rights of individual citizens. corporations are not people, not individuals, not citizens. there are more examples in america of the emperor's new clothes than i care to enumerate. 

what ever happened to simple honesty and plain speech? gun-owning americans are not militias, corporations are not persons and money is not speech. get it?

PEACE WITHOUT JUSTICE

there is a great deal of talk lately about peace in israel — actually i have been hearing more or less constantly all my adult life about efforts to bring peace in the region — but still there is no serious talk of justice. 

peace can never be the object of negotiations. that is impossible to attack as a first principle. there is only one route to peace and that is through finding just solutions, blind, disinterested, egalitarian solutions to problems between (self-identified) factions of the population. as long as individual human beings continue to see themselves as different and more deserving of the considerations of life than so-called enemies there is no prospect for justice. 

and no matter what rules to promote order may be imposed on the parties by intimidation, destruction and murder, no matter what historical rationale is advanced, the prospect of peace without justice will remain forever beyond the grasp of all. 

the old end justifies the means argument rests on the assumption that neither one is fictional. in reality the ends never arrive, but are always just one more action away, retreating apace as the troops advance, like the mirage they are, while the means, everpresent and ruefully if not brutally real, are the reality we all endure.

ONE WORLD

found in my desk drawer

chernobyl blew half a world away and they told us 
not to drink the rainwater.
now the wheatgrass and wildflowers are trembling in the breeze
looking nervous
and i wonder how we're going to tell them
not to drink the rainwater.

GOD IS GREED

in north america you vote with your wallet. every time you buy something you increase the demand for it and that yanks the supply chain and more of it gets produced. that is why in the early days of organic food, when they looked invariably like the worst produce for the highest price, i kept stubbornly buying them, one because i felt they were better for me, cosmetics aside, but also for an important second reason, that if i and others did not buy them they would never become more available and of better quality. this is why there is so much oil production in the world, because so many of us buy so much of it. that part of the democratic process i understand and approve (with reservations).

the part i disapprove unqualifiedly is how corporations and wealthy elites have continued another way to vote with their wallets. they buy political influence (notice i politely refrain from saying they buy politicians) and that method of asserting dominance over the majority of society has been reinforced by the worst supreme court majority in memory.

it is past time to get the money out of politics. there will be no improvement for the US or Canada or Mexico in anything, whether it is a fight over pipelines or oil  and gas drilling or keeping large standing armies to defend oil fields and  pipeline routes, which cost a fortune every year, and yes, use a lot of oil, or  over the fight against global warming and the keeping on earth anywhere of nuclear weapons, or the obscene amounts of energy the industrialized world is consuming, over drug wars and stupid private prison systems who refer to inmates as clients, and on and on. all these problems can be traced back to money and the obscene influence it exerts over both public and private decisionmaking. 

the god in america is not in its churches, excepting some private meetings, it is in the board rooms and back rooms — the god is greed.

THE ME I AM

there is something that is me, that stands aside from the tugging and pulling of events and surroundings, the core identity that would have been recognizably me no matter where i were growing up and living my life and no matter who were the significant persons that surrounded me during my days. that is the inherent me. 

even if that me can be modified by events and anecdotal accidents of a lifetime, so that many changes in my behavior and outlook can be traced to influences outside myself, those are still accidents —unplanned and unsought random incursions which were beyond my control and would have been reacted to by me in the unique way my genetically coded personality views the world beyond the self. the anecdotal story that is my life might have been quite different, given a different time or place, but the me that was there, alive and responding every day, would have been the me that was coded in my genes, the me i am.

MINIMUM STANDARDS

there is much talk lately about the Obama administration's efforts to raise minimum wage rates in the US. it takes about a minute to come up with a table of minima for the last 60 years in constant dollars and what it reveals is interesting. the highest level obtained in the US was in 1968 — since then there has been a decline over the decades up to the present (2013 in this case being the last year listed) which is listed at $4.87 in constant dollars ($7.25 in current dollars). in order to just equal the minimum rates enjoyed by the largely middle class workforce of the sixties the rate today in present dollars would have to rise to about $15 just to get even with our less divided and divisive past. states like connecticut offering to raise the rate (gradually over three years) to $10.10 dont seem to shine so bright beside the facts. 

related statistically and morally to this is the fact that since the meltdown in 2008 the US has lost fourteen places in the human development index, when disparity of income is factored in.

what is the matter with governance, politics and the level of information appreciated by the voting public that such a moral and practical decline can go unnoticed by not just the public but the public's common media informants?

EMPATHIES

i thought of something driving down the hill this morning. i think there are two kinds of emotional response to other people's troubles that loosely may be termed empathy:
the first is when you see someone in emotional or physical distress and it stimulates mirror neurons to elicit an emotional response in you. you feel the person's pain and want to help in any way you can to alleviate their distress — it is all about them.
the second is when you see someone in distress and that distresses you and your response is about trying to relieve the pain you are feeling in yourself — it is all about you. 
that second version, to me, seems like a kind of false empathy which makes you unavailable to focus your attention in a way that is useful in helping the other person. your own emotions are overwhelming you and though you buy in to whatever is happening (which may not always be useful if you are a parent) you remain the primary subject of your attention.

HEAT FROM GEORGE MONBIOT

HEAT FROM GEORGE MONBIOT
reprinted from 2007

I have just this moment finished reading HEAT and though it is laudable and well worth reading it does make certain assumptions and overlooks important elephants lurking in important corners. I think it might be useful to review Mr. Monbiot’s ideas from a more North American vantage, even a Saturna Island vantage, if you like, though I hope the following comments will not discourage interested readers from pursuing a subject increasingly vital to us all, wherever we live.

Assumption One: People will abandon their cars.

This may possibly wash in England where Mr. Monbiot is situated and from whose inhabitants’ habits he mines his comments, though I doubt it, but it will never wash in North America, probably not even in cities. The place is just too big, too sparse in humanity even considering the east and west coast corridors, and too rich. He could more properly have devoted his time (and mine) to realistic proposals to limit the size and especially the power of private automobiles. No properly designed and lightened automobile of any size needs more than ninety horsepower from whatever source to power it at legal speed limits up hill and down. Smaller four passenger vehicles need about 60 horsepower and could actually get along on less. If you are driving anything with more power than that you are the problem. These cars are already out there. The (original) Honda Insight has 60 horsepower, the Prius (gas portion) has 75. They are both a hoot to drive. And anyway, it will soon be that or nothing, which makes cars of this power not only the best choice but the only choice. Also, things are happening faster with batteries for all-electric vehicles, much faster, than with fuel cells or hydrogen (a joke). The new lithium manganese batteries are not explosive and are quite light and there are other lithium experiments such as lithium iron phosphate. All-electric is coming.

Assumption Two: Houses don’t have to get smaller.

What ever happened to ‘Think small’ or ‘Small is beautiful’, the reaction to the first serious oil shortages? Mr. Monbiot, who lives in a typical leaky old English house (built when energy was abundant and cheap) with one spouse and one infant daughter, never once mentions the idea that perhaps people don’t need all those thousands of square feet of indoor space. As Warburton Pike was fond of saying, on Saturna you could live under a tree. Go outside, for god’s sake. If you’re not cooking or doing deskwork or washing yourself or watching and reading at night, put a coat on and go do something in nature’s refreshing seasonally heated and cooled environment. And while we are on the subject, buy stock in Stanfield’s. Longjohns would be practical all winter, even on the mild west coast, if people didn’t overheat public buildings so outrageously. Well, at least you don’t have to do that at home. Try 60° F or even less. Many mornings, even in winter, I don’t bother to light a fire (though my woods absorbs more carbon dioxide than a fire would spew into the environment anyway— perhaps I should be selling carbon credits, the new papal dispensation, as Monbiot points out). Of course, I have an electric heater on my north wall which takes the chill off whenever the wind blows long enough to fully charge my batteries. In fact, I’ve even seen the sun do it on a long bright day with only two 64 watt panels. But then again, the cabin is 400 square feet in total, upstairs and down (which is more than roomy enough for one or even two) and I am not a heavy power feeder at the trough. Which brings us to

Assumption Three: People need this much energy.

This is a big elephant in another of Mr. Monbiot’s overlooked corners. He doesn’t really address the fact that radical reduction (he believes it must be 90 per cent) in carbon use can only be achieved by reducing our energy consumption by nearly that same amount. Too much attention is given throughout the book to minor ways to produce energy more efficiently and cleanly without hammering home the point that the amount of energy we use is obscenely more than what is strictly necessary and we could stop it tomorrow without breakthrough technologies. We are all about to find that out; I used to think it would be my grandchildren but now imagine it is my kids or even (gasp) myself!
When we on the hilltop decided to produce our own power, the first fact we had to digest was that certain things just cannot be done. Clothes dryers, electric cooking stoves, room heat, ordinary bulbs, are all taboo. Get used to it: Some things just cannot be done at all. Run a clothesline (rigged inside in winter). At the same time, Mr. Monbiot dismisses both solar and wind as micro-generating sources of local power. He knows not of what he speaks. That’s all we have on the hill and it is more than enough to have a comfortable, carbon-free domicile, as I would be pleased to demonstrate if he would get his head out of the tables graphs and data collected by others and go find out from the people who actually do it. Which leads me to

Assumption Four: People will not fly more slowly.

Once again, he has got his facts wrong. Mr. Monbiot compares jets to airliners of the pre-jet era. Propellors are good in modern form to about 400 knots and consume a fraction of the fuel of jet airliners commonly flying about 500 knots. The air at 25,00 feet is about as good from the perspective of weather avoidance as at 35-40,000 feet and requires less power to climb to. And a straight line (or great circle route) is still the same length. When faced with the choice of not travelling at all or travelling at four-fifths the speed, which would you take? As for small planes, for which I admit to having a fondness, modern streamlined composite aircraft offer the potential of 30 to 40 miles per gallon and the miles are typically one-and-a-half times greater over the ground than point to point. This equates to 58 mpg in US gallons (Dynamic WT9, for example) at 150 mph, although older aircraft (like mine) don’t do nearly that well, I admit in the interest of full disclosure.

So in spite of a commendable intent and a fine sense of urgency, poor assumptions combined with incomplete information and really no practical experience in alternative power in the life of the author have rendered the book and all its effort problematic as a guide to the near future. But I have saved the worst for last.

Assumption Five: You must join a group (or groups).

What about just closing the door on rooms you’re not using, turning down the heat, turning off the lights, wearing longjohns in winter, buying LED or, at least, compact flourescent bulbs, that clothesline? What about fixing up your old bike or getting better footwear? Going to town when there is more than one thing needing doing there, and a myriad of things you could actually do, instead of joining committees and going to meetings in heated buildings (probably in your car). Mr. Monbiot has in fact done some of these things, like bulbs and bicycles, in his own life. But in the last chapter, under Things We Can Do, he just appends a list of organisations. Is that it? Is that the sum total of his collected wisdom? That’s not action, that’s more talk.
Consumption is up to us— not collectively, either. There’s nothing to wait for. It starts now. As for the real things— small houses, small cars, less and slower travel— when they come be ready, it won’t hurt more than a bit. You might even find sailing, hiking and other non-invasive pastimes are actually fun and the reduced guilt will surprise you. The alternative, as Monbiot did clearly get right, is total destruction.

Copyright Hank Schachte all rights reserved 2007

SADNESS AND HAPPINESS

sadness is a global property of mind. it is relativistic. happiness is a singular and atomistic experience. it needs neither a past nor a future to be experienced, neither an expectation nor a memory. it is not burdened by time.

JUSTICE

Justice is the only goal worthy of a human, a nation or a world - disinterested, egalitarian, reciprocal justice.

HOW WILL HUMANS ORGANIZE THEMSELVES IN THE FUTURE?

I have started thinking. there is a lot to think about and read and it is interesting to pursue. 
i can tell you for starters, to start somewhere relatively easy, what they won't be doing: they won't be organizing in corporations, they won't be organizing in armies they won't be organizing along strongly nationalistic lines and they won't be organizing in competing religions. the hard part is envisioning how each of these damaged organizing principles will be either replaced or finally agreed to be considered not necessary in any form. 

AN INNOCENT ABROAD

hiking the ridge among the grasses, sky, birds and animals without a trace of another human presence, I can imagine we are anything i wish, so i imagine us driven fundamentally by concepts of reciprocal justice, something beautiful enough to be worthy of the natural beauty that surrounds me.

EXCERPT FROM WHAT THE MAN IS

by Hank Schachte

To possess another human being.  To be zealous, jealous, in thrall of chemical love, infatuated, passionate — what is that?  Something genetic, an urge, a force of nature to ensure the survival of the species, a package delivered from and by the genes, genes which are nothing but the collected strategies of time.  And it would come to a personal bad end.  It did not serve the individual.  To think of individual life is a philosophical error; in the long run there could never be such a thing; that singular thing exists only briefly, privately, fleetingly, like unstable particles with their rapid decay, rapid like the decay of a life.  To think of chemical love as a form of prejudice and a form of possession, not of the object desired but possession of one’s own will by an independent force — a triumph of species over self.

How delightful she is.  How every part of me enjoys enlisting in the deception.  How I favor her in every way, excuse her transgressions, boast her triumphs, aid her, enable her whenever I can without compromising my own ethics — every thought of her, every belief about her, colored warmly with this overlay of chemical prejudice.  How deeply unfair this necessity called love.

WISDOM, STUPIDITY

this life starts and this life ends. wisdom consists of knowing what is real. stupidity consists of believing your own bullshit — or other people's. it amounts to the same thing.

BIG RED C

okay, listen up guys — i've called this meeting to make some important and very exciting announcements about our company! as you know, we have pretty well dominated the local market here, to the point of saturation, and the books look good! profits are at record levels thanks to your vigorous and unflagging efforts to expand the business into every nook and cranny within delivery distance of our production facility. so we've been doing some planning. bob, here, in new markets, has come up with a whole network of connections that we intend to deploy to cover the entire kingdom — map, please — look at that! we're going everywhere! now what i need from you folks is courage, ambition and absolute belief in the mission. who will be the first to step forward and volunteer to go out and set up these new facilities? we've got the plan, you've got the opportunity. who are the boldest, most dynamic members of my team? who wants to help us make it real? and don't talk to me about risk — there is always risk! look back, remember our early days. how many were defeated? how many gave up? it was tough going. we nearly got wiped out, but a few of us hung on, we dug in our heels and refused to give up. and little by little we prevailed. we won this territory but it was a hard-fought victory, and a lot of us didn't make it. never mind — the thing is, those brave few pioneers paved the way for all the good times we've all enjoyed, all the rewards that follow success.
but wait! there's more! we not only have new network plans, we not only have new corporate branding — did i mention the new logo? — the marketing guys have come up with a whole new name! from now on — now look at this— we are BIG RED C! BIG RED C! don't you love it?! BIG C for commitment, BIG C for control, BIG C for conquest, BIG C for corporation, BIG C for corruption, BIG C for cancer! and don't anybody talk to me about metastasizing, that's a dirty word. we're just doing our job.

INJUSTICE

what animated Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr and many other leaders of social movements around the world in recent times also animated many fine writers of the period, including Albert Camus, Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau and others. it was injustice and it is still the main problem humanity has failed to address.

achieving social justice is the only conceivable path to peace within and between nations. capitalism, which has produced much material security in the industrialized world and has improved the lives of many people, is unfortunately based on inequality and it is therefore profoundly unjust and antidemocratic at its root. to speak of capitalist democracy is an oxymoron. the only democracy that could conceivably be entitled to the name is social democracy, which puts people ahead of capital at the centre of the state.

this social definition of democracy excludes communism and all other forms of insular centralized rule not answerable to the entire citizenry it seeks to govern. it excludes military action, invasion and threats of invasion, it excludes intimidation, destruction and murder of any people for any reason anywhere on earth, whether motivated by religious fervour or greed or for control of others who may be perceived as threats, or for any purpose whatever.

the use of intimidation, destruction and murder to achieve political ends is the dictionary definition of terrorism. armies, mostly state armies, have done most of the killing of humans on this planet and continue to do so. they are the large-scale terrorists so often ignored in discussions about terrorism and defence against it.

war is an almost uniquely human activity but it does not define us. war is not the reason there are seven billion humans alive today. cooperation, much more than the too-lauded competition that so often leads to conflict, is the real strength of human society. it is cooperation which has permitted human ascendance on the planet and it needs to be broadened to a final inclusiveness that encompasses all people everywhere. we need to permit the United Nations to evolve into a world-scale government of social democracy as a final highest-level force for cohesion and justice on this isolated and insulated little orb of ours.

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO

the NPR is mostly about politics, and that turns out to be, sadly, mostly american politics, which is unfortunately important in the present state of the world, but it is not often interesting. also, it ignores a reality that a great many people in the world, perhaps even the majority of people, observe when they look out their windows — the fact that it is peaceful out there. the danger in the media focus is that if we continue to hear only of strife, privation, power and other imbalances we may wind up living out our lives in a kind of make-believe setting that ignores a great part of the real world, the part which would make us more hopeful for our progeny and more willing to work for improvement ourselves. 

we are learning about ourselves, about animal life and all life, about our planet and the cosmos, at an unprecedented rate which like the cosmic expansion is accelerating. the fact that we will have to drag along in our wake the (genetically programmed) reluctant ultra-conservatives among us should not blind us to the speed we have reached in our species-long quest to satisfy our curiosity about everything we see. the work done and being done now deserves to be savoured and saved and built upon, and someday it may finally become an important focus of our public culture. balance would improve us all — including the NPR.

HOW SIMPLE, HOW IGNORANT

i used to think it was kind of lame for people to take meds to solve personality and emotional disorders, until i came to know well some people who really seemed to thrive only after the right meds were discovered for them. i read much about brain architecture and chemistry then, much that was new, really just learned since the advent of fMRI studies and personality genetics, until it finally dawned on me one day that the only reason i had used to think people shouldn't take meds was because i didn't need them. how simple. how ignorant.

i am afraid that the same kind of ignorance is rife in the political debates of today. the right wing types who think it is bad to help people in need are mostly just the types who — for reasons that may not be to their personal credit, but speak more to their situation — misunderstand why they themselves don't need any help, or fail to see how much help they in fact have already been given, and so strive to deny help to those who truly do need it.

sometimes our own experience can provide us very clear insights and sometimes our own experience is misunderstood by us. and when we project that misunderstood experience onto others whose lives we don't really intimately know, the mistakes we make are not useful, and the consequences of our misunderstanding can be tragic.

WHAT PEOPLE DO

not many people would like to be controlled by intimidation, not many people would like to have their possessions and their homes destroyed, not many people would like to be the victims of assault and murder, in fact when we find people who actually wish for these things to happen to themselves we consider them psychotic and try to help them improve their mental condition. why then do we not consider the people who perpetrate these crimes psychotic as well?

much of this modern world is operating on the basis of intimidation, destruction and murder — that is what armies do — and much excusing is done for it in the quest for global domination by the people who wish to dominate others in order to better secure comfort for themselves. in such a world comfort and security are never actually possible for anyone and it never will be possible until people broaden their interest to include comfort and security for all. 

i remember during the Iraq invasion how the Bush regime loudly proclaimed they were bringing freedom to the Iraqi people, but wouldn't the first freedom any society requires be freedom from invasion?

SPENDING WISELY

i listened to a canadian radio program this saturday morning, amazed. it was just listing ad nauseam all the most successful manufacturers and merchandisers of commodity products, sort of like listing the best hockey scores or football bowl winners of all time. i am still surprised that intelligent people i know listen to this program every week. i don't get it. the most successful manufacturers, retailers, advertisers in terms of sales — what do they have to teach me of any value? 

there is important information being generated every day about the cosmos, about life, animal life, human life, about the material universe, what it consists of and how it works, how we work, how best we can solve our very real and critical problems, problems that prevent us from finding justice and peace and security for now and the future, of how best we can prevent the destruction of the ecosystem of earth, including ourselves, and still provide for our needs in an equitable and sustainable way. and yet people find time to learn instead which clever marketers sell the most beer.

there is barely enough time to get on with it, without wasting most of it in useless production and consumption, not only of products, but of ideas. there are only so many thoughts in an hour, hours in a day and days in a life. time is the currency. it is what you are spending every day, and you will run out.      

i had a motto when i was younger — never wake sleeping people. now i think maybe that was wrong — maybe the most important thing one can do in this life is just exactly that — try to wake people from such trivial diversion. 

the final infidelity is to think it doesn't matter what you do.