Through the Eyes of a Daydreamer's Daughter

America has always been known for insistence on belief in the Judeo-Christian concepts of absolution and redemption. In America people have traditionally been given (or allowed to take) second chances. Americans have never expected their fellow citizens to commit hara-kiri for their blunders and sins. We've always reacted with public shock and disapproval if someone's repentance was demonstrated by death or disappearance. Inability to try to start over has always been weakness in our public eyes, and we, as a nation, tend to look down on weakness. In other cultures people are required to live with the consequences of their actions and choices, but Americans, for better or worse, have always been able to start over. Even our Canadian neighbors, who sometimes seem so much the same as us--if only in our eyes--are more bound by consequences than we are. My Canadian cousin remarked that she was amazed when I took a major step in life and then casually took a ...

I know most people want everyone to be for or against climate change whichever those people are espousing. Well, climate change is in fact one of the few constants of this planet. The climate will change whether we want to accept it or not. It is reality. How much impact we can have on the direction of climate change remains to be seen. How much sacrifice we as a species are willing to make to control the direction of climate change remains to be seen. In my experience those who talk the most about the dangers of climate change are the least willing to sacrifice to make a difference. And then there is the question of whether we would do harm or good for the planet if we could manipulate climate to our desires. In fact, it is not clear if we would do harm or good for ourselves as a species if we could manipulate climate to our tastes. We as a species have a track record of creating unintended consequences by our actions. And we as a species are not guaranteed immunity to the law...

War has a heavy hand that bruises everyone it touches no matter how slight and passing the touch. Even those who never experienced more than the Cold War grew up marked by that experience.  " Duck and cover" were words carved into children's hearts across America and perhaps across Russia as well.       In my childhood people built bomb shelters underground in their backyards and openly discussed whether to shoot neighbors who tried to enter their shelters, making no attempt to hide those discussions from their children.       I went to one school that required students in k thru 8 to wear military style dog tags on chains around their necks. We were inspected for those metal tags every morning and those who forgot them were sent home.       We all understood that the tags were intended to identify us if we died in school. My father explained tha...

Went out walking to enjoy the beautiful weather and started talking with a neighbor who is an unemployed Ph.D. research biologist. He was first laid off by big pharma after lengthy employment at the same company and then he worked 2.5 years with a smaller research company that simply closed its doors without warning right after the first of this year. He's also in touch with similarly well-educated friends who are also losing their jobs in this area because companies don't choose to do their research here or are not going to do new research at all... All the politicians talk about Americans not having skills? Why get advanced degrees when it guarantees unemployment? A lot of our other neighbors are experienced tradesmen--electricians and plumbers--and haven't worked in years. If it is such a sin to be more than 57.5 years old, do you think the powers that be plan to open extermination camps for the aging? Or will they just let older Americans die on the curb of starvat...

Everyone asks what everyone else thinks about Wisconsin but nobody really wants to hear anything but an echo of their own opinion--and that's part of the reason that there are no winners in Wisconsin and never could be. What I learned in more than 35 years of software development is that you can't solve a problem until you can produce an accurate and complete definition of what the problem is--once you can define the problem accurately, at least one solution is always obvious--but you can't define a problem accurately if you insist that the problem illustrate some other pattern or theory that you've attached your heart to for other reasons. Here's a thought, maybe Wisconsin is like a Roman circus that Right and Left Wingnuts created to obfuscate the fact that they don't know what the real nature of our society's problems are--like Rome's leaders they want to hold on to their own power by diverting the populace from awareness of the real threats on s...

Near as I can tell, the pastor who wants to burn Korans and the Imam who wants to build a "Cordoba House" on the edge of the hole in the ground created by his coreligionists are kind of the same man. Two different religions and slightly different beards--but in all the ways that count they are identical twins and identically repulsive. Too bad we can't join them at the hip, force them to live with each other, and the rest of us not have to deal with either of them. I have to say, I can never approve of burning books. History makes book burning just too uggy for words. By the same token, I'm tired of those who would control the American people and government by throwing temper tantrums and threatening violence. And in the meantime, even if we appease those who threaten, their folks commit violence anyway. If we just stopped trying to appease them--if our government declared that we would no longer attempt to appease them--if only their threats and violence didn...