Having read the last post, I can’t help but feel conflicted; I’d like to respond to the piece, saying the author is too hawkish, but I would only be fighting myself.
And, as I do not have the whole picture behind my rebuttal… nor behind the initial piece, such an argument seems like a waste of my time. I’ll forgive him the piece’s emotion, and grant that no solution conceivable in this modern world allows for those affected to be free, and those who run the apparatus of oppression to be freed from what they have created, allowed, done and become.
Save perhaps God, but I would bet a pretty dollar that such a deity, were it to exist, would never come; if He has not yet come to halt the countless horrors of history, and He isn’t here stopping us from completing our ruin of this rare life-supporting planet, then He is never going to come.
Hell, if She did, She would probably sooner fling us off the planet than help us become more comfortable in our incorrigible ways.
So, if you do not raise your children to be engineers or scientists, then otherwise they should be raised to be as thinkers generally. Ideas about freedom and how to best attain it, the good life, and useful civilization need to be thought and chewed by every little brain that comes along, so that when the stock of people mature, problems will be keyholes to our thoughtful key keepers.
The future is most easily changed just by looking at our children with hope and determination, our family and the elderly with respect, all other humans as real and important as we are to ourselves. Furthermore, we ought to view all life as being as inherently valuable as our own, citing our animal frame, animal brain, and evolutionary origin as being of life lower than modern day Homo sapiens.
If we behave like we are all living beings who respect and promote life, the good life, and values in accordance with this, then we will just stop constructing/supporting oppressive institutions, promoting oppressive habits, and disseminating manufactured/false desires. We would grow to see the illusion, and so the illusion would fall to pieces (peaces).
If our children are inquisitive and honest enough, then they can critically challenge the prevailing zeitgeist, and thus see that it is circumstance which is malleable, and not an objective dogma to be obeyed without question.
If we are truthful with ourselves, and we live like this with others, then it seems that time would untangle the mess for us. In time we would no longer have to function on ideology but rather by organic commerce, and free communication between humans, willing participants in what good system we can create for ourselves and life more generally.
Of course, to bring it back… if clouds and moons were made of candy, then x, y, z, right?
It doesn’t seem that people will agree with one another on key human values. No, not right now. But, those of us who have children, or who have friends who have children, you ought to give gifts, promote environments, and encourage behaviors which will create a healthy, open-minded, compassionate, and curious child.
If you and everyone else on the planet did this, and did not read their children whatever passages of the local mythos that singled them out as special, or paint the neighbors as bad or lesser than, then we would see the world unified within in 20 years.
Really.
World peace is only ever 20 years away if everyone gets the memo.
Anyway… speaking of children, it appears as though we have captured a better quality image of you when you were still quite young.
It turns out that when you were only a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old, you expanded 100 trillion trillion times your size.
Positing time (it seems that we must to discuss pĥysical change), at one moment you were only 1 nano nano micro meter3 and the next moment you were one and half meters3.
That’s a bigger difference than you realize.
But look at you now; I don’t know whether to gaze up into the night sky at you, glance at your while I wash my hands before the mirror, or take you out to dinner to look into your eyes and hear the thoughts and ways of life beyond my own mind.
Anyway, here is a video on the discovery of evidence supporting the idea of gravitational waves, themselves being consistent with this idea of inflation, that at an early stage of the hot and tiny Universe, early in its expansion, that it expanded faster than light would, were light to somehow race it.
Instead, I believe it is that the space between the matter expanded, and that is immune to the laws of matter and of particles… but that may be wrong, as I am not a cosmologist, and it also seems that such a rationale would posit empty space as being not at all empty.
Hmm, string theory… etc.
Ah yes, the the good news,
Cosmic inflation: ‘Spectacular’ discovery hailed – BBC News
Big Bang Gravitational Waves Discovered | Video
Addendum: Stanford Professor Andrei Linde reacts/celebrates physics breakthrough
Bonus, Neil deGrasse Tyson hamming it up on Late Night with Seth Meyers
Take care,
– J
a testament of sentience 
Pingback: North Korea: Skeleton in the closet – elephant in the room. | a testament of sentience