Replies

Three rules of thumb from Evolutionary Ecology, with which to predict the future. Resources will always grow limited without mortality. This will inevitably produce mortality. And nobody wants to die.

“If it comes down to tooth and claw, the militias.....the 6 o:clock news won’t be friendly”

If there was a revolution (I think economic collapse will come first, mostly because revolution is a big step, but who knows) it won’t be with militias. Not that there won’t be yahoos grouping up and dying en masse, but that won’t last long - and those guys were never going to win anyway. What is coming will be much more horrific, and it won’t be a war waged on government. It will be faceless mostly, local, and entirely directed at the softest targets on both sides, though I suspect the r’s will have it worse.

The media undoubtedly played a large role in Obama’s victory. But the deciding factor, as far as I can tell (and it is with limited information, but...) was the mobilization of voters. Whether we like it or not, there are a lot of lazy sacks of shit to whom liberty means nothing, and which will graze freely provided resources, and then vote Democrat - but who normally don’t.

Obama got them to vote, with help from the local community organizer infrastructure. This is why I think we are seeing the AW bans now. Things are getting shaky, and they have calculated that the risk of angering the NRA is ameliorated somewhat by their new voters, and it is all perhaps more necessary now, due to financial things we are not privy to at our level.

“This isn’t going to play like the years before our Civil War when Republicans were being shot down in Southern streets with impunity. It’s going to play like Oklahoma city and Waco.”

I don’t think so. I have a blog post coming up on this. I think these things evolve, with bad strategies culled, and good strategies retained. Wacos will happen, just because the feds will want them to, but they will be theater. OKC may happen, once or twice, but it will be yahoos, and not a normal part of the strategy which will evolve organically. The real war will be personal, and I suspect it will be waged with government on the sidelines, unable to be where the action is when it goes down, no matter how badly it will want to. None of us will be walking by our windows freely anymore, on either side.

I suspect K’s will win, since they will deal with the constant threat of death better than r’s, and be more tolerant of it, but I could be wrong. It is a long way out, and revolution probably will not even happen, to begin with. But if it does, I would not think we will have enough productivity to support welfarites, and the government will be mostly tied up dealing with what will be an epic mess there. Lotsa r-mouths crowded together, and no free food will be fun. Especially when they are crunched up against the moderately and very rich r’s, who were designed to be preyed upon.

“The strategic winners have better technology and the mental/organizational infrastructure it’s based on every time, whether raw materiel, long bows, horse mobility or A-bombs.”

Not always. Vietnam, even back to the Revolutionary War. A well motivated group can find ways to disable a lot of technological advantages, and exploit a lot of weaknesses. And even then, outcomes are dependent on a lot of things, especially motivation to win, and paths of least resistance which open up. Plus, we have never seen a battlefield where information was so freely available to both participants, or where the technology was so freely available to both sides.

I am not certain r’s will not fold once the horrors begin. Stockholm Syndrome is a natural r-phenomenon of competition avoidance. Hell we had Liberals taking Osama’s side after 9/11, asking what we did to make him so angry. I will not be surprised, if the threat is made real to them, they will cave immediately.

Either way, whatever happens, I know one thing for sure. Someday in the future, the most successful society in the world somewhere, will rise out of chaos to view homosexuals as aberrant, shame single moms, discourage promiscuity and sexual exposure of children, demand loyalty to in-group, pedestalize the masculine man, and punish the pansy, punish a whole range of behaviors which are not pro-social but which hurt no-one, encourage women to be homemakers, view masculine women with suspicion, and they will be wildly successful, globally. They may even hold trials at some point, the explicit purpose of which will be to find and punish r-sympathizers. And then the whole thing will gradually turn r and come down all over again.

“Your K environment lawfully evolves to an r environment every time.”

Yes, that is true, I have written about this. And then it turns back. Every time. I don’t view this as strange, because I see it in the context of ecology, where no population can expand freely forever, absent mortality. And once mortality shows up, and the only choice is flee and die, or fight and kill, K will return, because it is designed for that killing environment, which history (and Ecology) indicate is unavoidable.

“What you will need is a global governance of some sort that can regulate the quantity of war vs. its absence, like the Aztec “War of the Flowers”, a matter of combat theatrics to provide sacrificial victims for the temples.”

Yes! I love this part, because what I see everywhere is people who understand the basics of this whole thing, on a very deep level, but don’t realize it. I mean, you coming up with that – it is as if you have been studying Evolutionary Ecology, and its relation to politics for years. Where does that come from? Question, and it is my only one : Would you be more comfortable in a world of random mortality, where a lottery sentenced indiiduals to death at the hands of another or a world where mortality arose organically in equal measure to the first, out of shortage and violence at the hands of others? Assume the deaths would be equally painful.

Back to your insight. There is only one way to sustain an r-environment in nature, and it is with a constant level of mortality. That is why you see it expressed most purely in rabbits, mice, etc. The Predator provides the mortality, which keeps the population constantly below the carrying capacity of the environment, which in turn, keeps resources freely available at all times. Without the mortality, things always turn K. Liberals, without ever studying ecology, know this, and I can’t imagine how.

Liberals seem to want to try to do this other ways, instinctually, even though they don’t consciously know of the r/K relationship. From forced sterilizations to sterilants in drinking water, to Brave New World’s gestation bottles, and government run breeding, to over-population concerns and Malthus. China did it it’s own way with births. Stalin had his methods.

The problem you have is, r’s are are fundamentally less capable at inflicting mortality themselves. Occasionally, r’s can rise up and seize power, ala the Soviet Union, so they can get the K’s of the society to do their killing for them.

But r’s can’t eliminate the competition in our species – it is in the DNA. Gain power, ala Lenin, and K’s will realize the rules have changed, and then dive in, and what you eventually end up with is an even more aggressive and ruthless K than you had when you started – because those K’s which succeed do so in a less rule/honor governed r-model of competition. Try advocating for gays in Russia today. Try telling the government the rich need their wealth seized, and given to the poor. Try taking the side of the Chechens. It is more K than we are, and it wouldn’t be that way if Communism had never taken hold.

r’s are chaos generators. K creates great, efficient systems, r wrecks them, collapses the system through delusional attempts to make it better, then K-selection returns, and r’s then either adapt by becoming K out of necessity (most) or die back, resulting in a more K-environment. As a mechanist, I find this very cool. Jiggle it one way more than it should go, and it will jiggle itself back the other way, more than it would have gone otherwise.

You may not like my work, but it is sound, and will eventually be how politics is universally viewed - it is just too interesting to go away. It will prove predictive, if looking back is any measure. And I have no doubt it will have dramatic effect on the nature of our battles in the future. Knock it all you like, but all you are doing is ignoring what I think will be the greatest advance in the Political Sciences since the American Constitution. And I have a feeling your IQ is high enough that you see that.

>>Three rules of thumb from Evolutionary Ecology, with which to predict the future. Resources will always grow limited without mortality. This will inevitably produce mortality. And nobody wants to die.

Malthusianism when applied to humans is a bit of a fallacy because it is 1) the work of British East India Company empire builders and obsolete by 200+ years and 2) and fails to understand the process of human invention. Enviromaniacs love to quote crap data about the “carrying capacity” of the planet because they fail is the same way, tho not necessarily because they lack data on how technology absolutely insures population density, but because deep down they are a gnostic priesthood who feel that humans were built by a Luciferian demiurge and are inherently evil and unworthy of life. Read Buckminster Fuller’s “Ideas and Integrities” for some hard data on the true carrying capacity of this planet. It’s not infinite, but it’s orders of magnitude greater than the populations we have today, given large scale development and water projects such as the NAWAPA project.

“If it comes down to tooth and claw, the militias.....the 6 o:clock news won’t be friendly”

>>If there was a revolution (I think economic collapse will come first,

Yah, but will the collapse be purpose engineered to destroy participatory democracy by the fascist monopolist oligarchs?
Nazism is not dead, and I’m not talking about street level skinhead prison gangs.

>>mostly because revolution is a big step, but who knows) it won’t be with militias. Not that there won’t be yahoos grouping up and dying en masse, but that won’t last long - and those guys were never going to win anyway.

My take as well. They simply won’t be able to hide from IR and other detection.

>>What is coming will be much more horrific, and it won’t be a war waged on government. It will be faceless mostly, local, and entirely directed at the softest targets on both sides, though I suspect the r’s will have it worse.

Are you describing gang violence? Certainly an urban insurrection will be harder to root out than a rural one and there will be food and commodity shortages.

>>The media undoubtedly played a large role in Obama’s victory. But the deciding factor, as far as I can tell (and it is with limited information, but...) was the mobilization of voters. Whether we like it or not, there are a lot of lazy sacks of shit to whom liberty means nothing, and which will graze freely provided resources, and then vote Democrat - but who normally don’t.

This question needs to factor in the degree to which media is creating lazy sacks of etc. Imagine a Fox News boardroom in 9/10 of all media outlets and how different our social landscape would look and you’ll appreciate the power being exercised there.

>>Obama got them to vote, with help from the local community organizer infrastructure.

All I got during this election was a barrage of robo-calls that I found more than irritating. I think that Romney appeared too corporate, too ruling class. He was too manicured, scripted and fashion model good looking, a Ken doll. He may have had a chance if he had worn glasses and appeared professorial and had the intellectual depth of Gingrich or wore dark glasses and jammed on the sax with some hipsters. I’m not joking. This is the age of image and style. Sadly, people presume this to be the contemporary idea of a “frontier”. Read your Marshal McLuhan. His ideas ain’t chopped liver.

>>This is why I think we are seeing the AW bans now. Things are getting shaky, and they have calculated that the risk of angering the NRA is ameliorated somewhat by their new voters, and it is all perhaps more necessary now, due to financial things we are not privy to at our level.

Public opinion can shift in a heartbeat. Pearl Harbor. Gun bans have always been on their agenda, they want a peaceful enviro-trotskyite globalist takeover. It’s all about stealth in the media environment. Look at the event that precipitated all this. Reminded me of Three Mile Island happening 2 weeks after the release of “China Syndrome”. Uncanny timing. I the Sandy Hook case, conservatives need to (gasp) join with liberals in a frontal assault on monopolist pharmacological corporations who are poisoning our children and creating these “side effect” monsters who shoot up our classrooms. We can only hope that their boardrooms discover just how soft they are as a target.

“This isn’t going to play like the years before our Civil War when Republicans were being shot down in Southern streets with impunity. It’s going to play like Oklahoma city and Waco.”

>>I don’t think so. I have a blog post coming up on this. I think these things evolve, with bad strategies culled, and good strategies retained. Wacos will happen, just because the feds will want them to, but they will be theater. OKC may happen, once or twice, but it will be yahoos, and not a normal part of the strategy which will evolve organically.

But “theater” is the name of the game and their ace in the hole. We can learn from that playbook, particularly the guerilla theater one. Theater is what liberals do best and what electronic media amplifies best. We need to start sending our kids to acting school. I’m not kidding. We can’t get away with a few stunt men making it to the top in Hollywood or a few soap opera actors getting a movie gig. If we can’t take the media back, it’s game over.

>>The real war will be personal, and I suspect it will be waged with government on the sidelines, unable to be where the action is when it goes down, no matter how badly it will want to. None of us will be walking by our windows freely anymore, on either side.

You could be right to the degree that drug cadres control Northern Mexico. Maybe Mexico will do what Colombia did and turn a blind eye to tight knit bands of LEO’s “moonlighting” on weekends.

>>I suspect K’s will win, since they will deal with the constant threat of death better than r’s, and be more tolerant of it, but I could be wrong.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that our stereotypes of liberals and their radical extremists are accurate or total. Your schematic may have merit tactically, but strategically the game will go to the most flexible and adaptable as it always does. And by adaptable I don’t mean they will defect to save their hides. They will become effective fighters and then, more than likely down the road, become what they fought against, LOL. But at that point it will be K’s against K’s who used to be r’s. Don’t assume that the will to survive necessarily results in a conservative ideology, brain chemistry or no. I only have to conjure Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. You need to recompute the K-r dynamic to include the power of ideology.

>>It is a long way out, and revolution probably will not even happen, to begin with.

I’m going to tell you one thing, kid...suitcase nuke.

>>But if it does, I would not think we will have enough productivity to support welfarites, and the government will be mostly tied up dealing with what will be an epic mess there. Lotsa r-mouths crowded together, and no free food will be fun. Especially when they are crunched up against the moderately and very rich r’s, who were designed to be preyed upon.

Again, stereotypes don’t help. You need to study the organic farming movement; lots of hard working people with collective blueprints who will take over fallow farm land by force if necessary and patrol it kibbutz style.

“The strategic winners have better technology and the mental/organizational infrastructure it’s based on every time, whether raw materiel, long bows, horse mobility or A-bombs.”

>>Not always. Vietnam, even back to the Revolutionary War. A well motivated group can find ways to disable a lot of technological advantages, and exploit a lot of weaknesses.

Reread my comment, the part about mental/organizational. We fought the Viet Cong like the French and any imperial power would, with last year’s conceptual framework. We needed to frame that conflict in terms of more Montangnards led by Green Berets, Seals and Recon elements and spend the money slated for ginormous supply dumps on roads, schools and hospitals.

>>And even then, outcomes are dependent on a lot of things, especially motivation to win, and paths of least resistance which open up. Plus, we have never seen a battlefield where information was so freely available to both participants, or where the technology was so freely available to both sides.

Yes. Flexibility vs. set piece warfare, a battlefield where imagination can become a potent weapons array. This requires intensive elite commando style training. Trouble is, you don’t want to lose highly trained assets.

>>I am not certain r’s will not fold once the horrors begin. Stockholm Syndrome is a natural r-phenomenon of competition avoidance. Hell we had Liberals taking Osama’s side after 9/11, asking what we did to make him so angry. I will not be surprised, if the threat is made real to them, they will cave immediately.

You will be surprised. It will be like Operation Barbarossa, wiping up everything in sight until resistance stiffens and then counterattacks. You think the nation’s martial arts classrooms are populated by K types only. And don’t overlook the phenomena among our young such as skateboarding, snowboarding and jackass stunts. These guys are not afraid of pain or risk. You wouldn’t want to send a flying squad of KKK skinheads to a Slayer mosh pit, they’d get their heads stove before their first stage dive. neo-Nazi skins got the crap pounded out of them in NYC and Jersey in the 70’s by a couple of gangs of punks who simply weren’t intimidated and could use their fists like a streetfighter roustabout.

>>Either way, whatever happens, I know one thing for sure. Someday in the future, the most successful society in the world somewhere, will rise out of chaos to view homosexuals as aberrant, shame single moms, discourage promiscuity and sexual exposure of children, demand loyalty to in-group, pedestalize the masculine man, and punish the pansy, punish a whole range of behaviors which are not pro-social but which hurt no-one, encourage women to be homemakers, view masculine women with suspicion, and they will be wildly successful, globally. They may even hold trials at some point, the explicit purpose of which will be to find and punish r-sympathizers. And then the whole thing will gradually turn r and come down all over again.

But that echoes the modeling of a lot of Black Bloc anarcho-nihilists who are hell bent on destroying everything because anything rising from the ashes would be better than capitalism and conservative values.

“Your K environment lawfully evolves to an r environment every time.”

>>Yes, that is true, I have written about this. And then it turns back. Every time. I don’t view this as strange, because I see it in the context of ecology, where no population can expand freely forever, absent mortality. And once mortality shows up, and the only choice is flee and die, or fight and kill, K will return, because it is designed for that killing environment, which history (and Ecology) indicate is unavoidable.

See my anti-Malthusian ideas above. But also realize that flee does not necessarily equate to die. A zillion years of evolution, including brain chemistry evolution, shows that flee and live is a damned effective survival strategy, otherwise why would it still be an option? And, in a natural setting, prey animals will outnumber predators by orders of magnitude. Animals have scant concept of time. We humans “bind time” (Alfred Korzybski) and can plan for the future based on the past PLUS the flexibility of greater adaptive behavior. Our adaptability is precisely what gives us an utterly unique ecological niche, one that Mother Nature, that destroyer bitch, stares at like a deer caught in the headlights.

>>Yes! I love this part, because what I see everywhere is people who understand the basics of this whole thing, on a very deep level, but don’t realize it. I mean, you coming up with that – it is as if you have been studying Evolutionary Ecology, and its relation to politics for years.

Nah, I just have an interest in Aztec lore as part of a greater interest in comparative mythology. I’ll tell you something about myself, I’m an ex hippie anarchist underground starving artist who managed to find huge quantities of free time to read and learn out of the simple joy of better understanding this miracle world we inhabit. I’ll also report that there are a surprising number of my peers who are disgusted with the intellectual corruption of the postmodern left, particularly regards the greatest scam on Earth, global warming, er, climate change.

>>Where does that come from? Question, and it is my only one : Would you be more comfortable in a world of random mortality, where a lottery sentenced individuals to death at the hands of another or a world where mortality arose organically in equal measure to the first, out of shortage and violence at the hands of others? Assume the deaths would be equally painful.

Well, I understand your point, and would favor the natural option, of course, because causality could be analyzed and incorporated into a survival strategy. But again, humans are not according to Nature’s design. We transcend Nature, like any organism transcends the womb, and, in many ways we are superior to Nature, we are divine, godlike, however you want to phrase it. This is not egomania or pride, it is a ding dong fact. Furthermore, and I’ll save my reasons for another discussion, I am convinced by the weight of scientific evidence and a unique interpretive framework, that Earth is the only planet in an infinite Universe evolving over an infinite period of time that has life on it, let alone sentient life. This implies a sense of responsibility commensurate with those cited infinite figures. If we are Gods, we better start acting like it. Or for Freeper Christians, if Christ inhabits us, we better start acting Christlike.

>>Back to your insight. There is only one way to sustain an r-environment in nature, and it is with a constant level of mortality. That is why you see it expressed most purely in rabbits, mice, etc. The Predator provides the mortality, which keeps the population constantly below the carrying capacity of the environment, which in turn, keeps resources freely available at all times. Without the mortality, things always turn K. Liberals, without ever studying ecology, know this, and I can’t imagine how.

Again, humans aren’t rats. We invent. We invent more efficient processes of food extraction and preservation. We make margarine out of tar and Tang out of corn. The lefties equate a chimpanzee using a stick to pull termites out of their nest with putting a man on the Moon or writing the Eroica Symphony. This begs discussion of what a boundary actually is. Me and a lot of mathematicians will
argue until the sun goes down up that all statistical quanta are microscopically lumpy and boundaries are what lumps are. Dolphins go eek and lefties say...look! Language! Sentience! Spirituality! Wrong Fabulous Furry Freak Brother, it’s signal not language, it is semaphore not Shakespeare, and the quantity of complexity involved turns it into a different species or category.

>>Liberals seem to want to try to do this other ways, instinctually, even though they don’t consciously know of the r/K relationship. From forced sterilizations to sterilants in drinking water, to Brave New World’s gestation bottles, and government run breeding, to over-population concerns and Malthus. China did it it’s own way with births. Stalin had his methods.

I’m not sure we can call Stalin or Mao liberals using the generally accepted meaning. Marxist is not necessarily the same as a New Age airhead. Wanting equitable working conditions and an equitable wage is not the same as wanting to have a multi-bong TV party. In fact, there are some Marxist conspiratorialists who feel that the whole hippie dippy Summer of LSD Love was engineered by the Stanford Research Institute to disperse and dilute strength from actual Marxist Comintern CPUSA agitation. Read the book “Acid Dreams” for a new take on the CIA’s role as drug pusher of LSD and any number of other books on the CIA’s role in trafficking drugs to add to their black ops budget.

>>The problem you have is, r’s are fundamentally less capable at inflicting mortality themselves. Occasionally, r’s can rise up and seize power, ala the Soviet Union, so they can get the K’s of the society to do their killing for them.

Um, I’m afraid they kinda did a lot of the killing themselves. Take a look at the Ukrainian movie “Cheka” to see where Hitler learned all he needed to know about death camps. I’m going to ruffle some feathers by saying that 90% of the Cheka death squads in the early Soviet Union were Jewish. Sad fact, but true as hell. What is also poorly recognized by liberals is that the first victims of Lenin, within days of consolidating control in Petersburg and Moscow, were all the other socialists who didn’t toe the correct bolshevik party line.

>But r’s can’t eliminate the competition in our species – it is in the DNA.

Sure we need to compete, even when the grill is covered in burgers and ribs, we do it for fun. It’s part of what we are. The trick is to sublimate it away from psychopathic behavior.

>>Gain power, ala Lenin, and K’s will realize the rules have changed, and then dive in, and what you eventually end up with is an even more aggressive and ruthless K than you had when you started – because those K’s which succeed do so in a less rule/honor governed r-model of competition.

Agreed in spades. Mob psychology is one of the ugliest things on Earth. How do we teach people to evaluate and come to conclusions by themselves? In this day and age, we certainly have enough data at our fingertips.

>>Try advocating for gays in Russia today. Try telling the government the rich need their wealth seized, and given to the poor. Try taking the side of the Chechens. It is more K than we are, and it wouldn’t be that way if Communism had never taken hold.

All true. Who knows what would have happened if Russian capitalism had marginalized their aristocracy into quaint artifacts populating a Disneyland. Communism took hold, though, precisely because the aristocracy was feudal, reactionary, sociopathic and ultimately self-destructive. A lot of conservatives think that Marxists are evil wizard hypnotists. Wrong. Marxism was the defensive reaction of huge segments of society who were treated like vermin by ruling class and capitalist class elements. Working conditions under early capitalism were just short of slavery. Who wants to be a slave? We look at union featherbedding and wage demands as excessive and they are, but then we conclude that that is how unions have always acted, like gangsters. We really need to read about working conditions in urban centers of the 1800’s. No way you’d send your kid to work in a cotton mill dawn to dusk, breathing fibers, growing up illiterate and alcoholic. Conservatives think that child labor and safety laws were written into statute by enlightened factory owners and then they’ll point to the occasional 20th century example of factory towns. This covered perhaps a ten millionth of the world labor force and relying on that statistic as a balm to conservative consciences is an act of utter delusion. The treatment of factory, farm and other workers in the industrial age is a record of contemptible abomination.

>>r’s are chaos generators. K creates great, efficient systems, r wrecks them, collapses the system through delusional attempts to make it better, then K-selection returns, and r’s then either adapt by becoming K out of necessity (most) or die back, resulting in a more K-environment. As a mechanist, I find this very cool. Jiggle it one way more than it should go, and it will jiggle itself back the other way, more than it would have gone otherwise.

A self-regulating feedback system to be sure. But you had better be certain of your variables. You are using a lot of stereotypes in that equation. For example, that equation absolutely does not take into account invisible hand manipulations, the setting of one side against the other purposefully by macchiavelian manipulators. How do you think the Vatican has remained in power for millennia?
No standing army, sacked only occasionally, serious freaking players, yet I’m not certain what hours of daily prayer and contemplation do for the amygdala.

>>You may not like my work, but it is sound, and will eventually be how politics is universally viewed - it is just too interesting to go away.

It IS interesting, no question, and needs to be added to the mix. The quest of humanity is to discover what we are across all the disciplines. The trick is to not be trapped into an interpretive frame of reference that can be blind sided. Also, your schematic needs to consider the differences between tactical and strategic considerations. And then, the cherry on top, what exactly is our potential? Can we escape these biological feedback loops? We’ve certainly transcended many limitations that Nature imposes on the animal kingdom. How many others are there to tackle with both K and r sensibilities in our holsters? The point I keep trying to make is that the r end of the spectrum is not stupid, they have hegemony. If you want to wait around for your formula to kick in, go for it. Me, I’d rather put some of my r-contemplation derived insights into a K inspired attack on stupidity. I don’t see ANY precondition of Nature as limiting. We have a Universe to discover and a planet to protect from the cosmic pinball game. I think we should all go K consciousness against the tyrant bitch Nature, THAT’S the enemy.

>>It will prove predictive, if looking back is any measure.

It certainly is and the K-r schematic is workable to a degree and in certain circumstances. But there are variables that are not being dealt with because of the stereotypical categorizations I see. I’m not saying that the antics of liberals deserve a pass, or that objectivity requires a dispassionate observation. It’s hard to be dispassionate even in the best of times. And conservatives engage in antics also, tho not as much as in past times since we are now the underdog.

>>And I have no doubt it will have dramatic effect on the nature of our battles in the future. Knock it all you like, but all you are doing is ignoring what I think will be the greatest advance in the Political Sciences since the American Constitution. And I have a feeling your IQ is high enough that you see that.

I try to keep my IQ out of the dogpile. It’s just that I see the chemistry happening a bit differently. I tend to view both fight/flight as at the same end of the spectrum rather than at opposite ends. They are both adrenaline fueled and they both require a narrow cone of attention laid upon the threat factor. They are both extremely limiting spatially, but worse, obliterate any sense of future time or ideal, they obliterate or bypass mind and substitute nothing more than reaction, automatic reflex arc response. It is not how you build civilizations, it is not how you create beauty, it is not how you become holy or divine or made in God’s image. That simple.

But I’m really enjoying this exchange and would hope it could continue. I’ve been thinking that Free Republic might be doing itself a favor if we could come up with a forum dedicated to the philosophical end of things, where principles and their causes and results are discussed openly in the intellectual spirit of our founding fathers. They were very bright people who were sons and daughters of the exiled anti-monarchy European intelligentsia of the era. Literacy in the Colonies was near 90%, while in England and Europe, about 30%. They were from immigrant stock who were political outcasts from an oppressive feudal oligarchical system who knew the power of a free mind to create power over Nature, cynicism, ignorance, superstition, cruelty and narcisism. I simply want to live a life and do things that would make them proud. So many have died so I can type this, and I feel their presence in my profounder moments. What would it take to create a special interest sub-blog here dedicated to the amplification of mind and curiosity?